Space Tourism Isn’t Frivolous, or Impossible

Re:Space Tourism Isn’t Frivolous, or Impossible by melling on Tuesday November 04, 2014 @09:54AM (#8556728)

Sure it is. It's a company selling a trip to "space". If they succeed they can reinvest the revenue into R&D to build better "spaceships", and so on. Additionally, other people will see a profitable company and try to enter the market.

There's a whole snowball effect. Tesla is doing the same thing with the electric car.

By the way, outer space does begin at 100 kilometers.

http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kármán_line

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Re:Space Tourism Isn’t Frivolous, or Impossible by ck2 on Tuesday November 04, 2014 @11:27AM (#8557364)

What part of "atmosphere up to 150km" makes 100km space?

At 100km it is dark and cold but there is atmosphere.

That's not "space" in my book.

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Re:Space Tourism Isn’t Frivolous, or Impossible by msl on Tuesday November 04, 2014 @12:26PM (#8557744)

The International Space Station, orbiting at around 420km is dragged down by atmosphere[1], so I'm going to call that 150km limit an arbitrary one. Also, the Wikipedia article on the subject[2] doesn't appear to consider it worthy of even mentioning.

You are, of course, entitled to define "space" however you want in your own book, but be adviced that a lot of people will disagree with your definition.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Night_Glider_mode [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atmosphere_of_Earth

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Re:Space Tourism Isn’t Frivolous, or Impossible by melling on Tuesday November 04, 2014 @12:36PM (#8557825)

Unfortunately, you and I don't actually decide. We can simply reference what's already accepted.

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