How High is Space?
Look up, there’s space. Astronomically speaking, it’s right there, just outside a thin layer of atmosphere. But how far away is it? How high is space?
Space is defined by the point at which the Earth’s atmosphere ends, and the vacuum of space takes over.
As you can probably imagine, with such a subjective definition, people disagree on exactly where space begins.
This was the altitude that airplane control surfaces could no longer be used, and corresponded to roughly 50 miles, or 81 kilometers.
Shortly after that definition, the aerospace engineer Theodore von Kármán calculated that above an altitude of 100 km, the atmosphere would be so thin that an aircraft would need to be traveling at orbital velocity to derive any lift.
This altitude was later adopted as the Karman Line by the World Air Sports Federation.
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