Where does space really begin? Chinese spy balloon highlights legal fuzziness of ‘near space’
grid.newsSubmitted by HarpuasGhost t3_114s21e in space
Submitted by HarpuasGhost t3_114s21e in space
I believe it’s considered about 60 miles (100 km) above the Earth. That’s where conventional aircraft don’t have enough atmosphere to fly.
Planes lose that ability around 50k feet. Military planes get closer to 100k feet. 60miles is easily 3x that.
It's not a practical limit, it's a theoretical one. The original calculation that the 100km/62mile definition allegedly stems from was done by Theodore von Kármán, who determined that at ~84km/52miles, an airplane would have to move so fast to produce sufficient lift that it's speed would place it in orbit. The number was rounded up in most countries to 100km, though down to 50 miles in the US.
The fact that noone has actually flown a plane in sustained flight anywhere near that high doesn't change the math. Though I'd note that there have been unpowered flights at such altitudes - the Space Shuttle, Buran, X-37B, various hypersonic glide vehicles, etc.
Perhaps the best example is the Apollo capsule - not typically something you'd think of as an aircraft, but it did produce lift, and if you look at it's reentry profile you can see that it managed to maintain (approximately) level flight at around 200,000ft for a fair distance, before finally bleeding off enough speed to continue descending.
If the Apollo capsule, or Space Shuttle, or whatever had been fitted with some form of propulsion to maintain speed, then they could theoretically have sustained level flight at over 200,000ft - at least until their heatshields gave out anyway.
did you read the article?
The article is a bit of clickbait, It's not so much legal fuzziness as more there's no one agreed upon international defined limit, many countries use the Karmann line as the legal standard whereas the US defines it as 50 miles. So it is legally defined It just depends on where you're standing on the surface of the planet
Should we call the limit on the where international waters start "fuzzy" just because the Chinese use a greater distance from their shores than the US and other countries?
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