Ah yes, American…

For the record, there were rather loud thunderstorms last night in my area that probably intruded in on a space dream I was having.

Thanks! I must have missed this. There was a period the past week where I wasn’t able to check this blog for three days in a row, and probably would have missed it anyway.

- Jack

Thank you, I knew someone would have the answer directly. It would be interesting to see a timeline of occupation starting in 1961.

- Jack

Well, I don’t know about The Big Bang, but the last time I saw Gaslight, Ingrid Bergman was nearly done in. Thank God for Joseph Cotten. Oops!!

Maybe (Wan Hu) he was the first man in space.

According to Battlestar Wiki, Hera Agathon, the Mitochondrial Eve, came from outer space.

The final crew to visit the Mir Space Station before it’s deorbit, landed on June 16, 2000.

The first crew of the International Space Station launched October 31, 2000. To my knowledge, outer space has been continually occupied by at least two people at any given point since then.

http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/badastronomy/2009/05/08/ba-review-star-trek/

oops you asked a couple of threads ago.

PS @ Jennifer #10 – They did include one X-15 pilot, #13 Joseph Walker. Guess he met the higher 100 km requirement.

Extract from Wikipedia:

The Kármán line lies at an altitude of 100 km (62.14 miles) above the Earth’s sea level, and is commonly used to define the boundary between the Earth’s atmosphere and outer space. This definition is accepted by the Fédération Aéronautique Internationale (FAI), which is an international standard setting and record-keeping body for aeronautics and astronautics.

The line was named after Theodore von Kármán, a Hungarian-American engineer and physicist who was active primarily in the fields of aeronautics and astronautics. He first calculated that around this altitude the Earth’s atmosphere becomes too thin for aeronautical purposes (because any vehicle at this altitude would have to travel faster than orbital velocity in order to derive sufficient aerodynamic lift from the atmosphere to support itself). Also, there is an abrupt increase in atmospheric temperature and interaction with solar radiation.

Overview

Strictly speaking, there is no such thing as an end to Earth’s atmosphere: An atmosphere does not technically end at any given height, but becomes progressively thinner with altitude. Also, depending on how the various layers that make up the space around the Earth are defined (and depending on whether these layers are considered as part of the actual atmosphere), the definition of the edge of space could vary considerably: If one were to consider the thermosphere and exosphere part of the atmosphere and not of space, one might have to place the boundary to space as high as about 10,000 km (~6214 miles) above sea level.

When studying aeronautics and astronautics in the 1950s, Kármán calculated that above an altitude of roughly 100 kilometers (62 mi), a vehicle would have to fly faster than orbital velocity in order to derive sufficient aerodynamic lift from the atmosphere to support itself. Though the calculated altitude was not exactly 100 km, Kármán proposed that 100 km be the designated boundary to space as the round number is more memorable and the calculated altitude varies minutely as certain parameters are varied. An international committee recommended the 100 km line to the FAI, and upon adoption it became widely accepted as the boundary to space for many purposes. However, there is still no international legal definition of the demarcation between a country’s air space and outer space.

Another hurdle to strictly defining the boundary to space is the dynamic nature of Earth’s atmosphere. For example, at an altitude of 1000 km (621 miles), the atmosphere’s density may vary by a factor of five, depending on the time of day, time of year, AP magnetic index, and recent solar flux.

[...]

Secondly, I note that this list counts individuals, not number of flights. So Story Musgrave only counts as one, not five or six (I forgot how many flights he made). Does anyone have the number for the number of flights, counting each time an astronaut goes up separately?

- Jack

Again, you’ve answered your own question. The “fuss” was all propaganda. Yes, we’d planned to have a manned flight prior to April 1961, but so did the Soviets. They just got their bugs fixed sooner (plus were willing to risk the pilot’s life with fewer safety systems).

The US tried to spin Shepard’s flight exactly the way you stated. I was only 8 at the time, but I still have the encyclopedia yearbook from that year that shows a diagram of Shepard’s vs. Gagarin’s flight. They show the American’s apogee (115 miles) and the Russian’s perigee (112 miles) just to make sure we looked “better.”

No one bought it, really, which is why John Glenn’s flight orbital flight nine months later was such a big deal. We’d finally “caught up” with the Soviets. Except that we hadn’t. By the time Glenn made three orbits of the Earth in “Friendship 7″, the Soviets had already flown Vostok 2 with Titov (17 orbits). A few months after Glenn, Scott Carpenter repeated the 3 orbit mission (and embarrassed NASA by overshooting his recovery target by ~200 miles), but the Soviets responded by flying Nikolaev (Vostok 3) and Popovich (Vostok 4) on missions at the same time. We looked pretty second rate at that time.

- Jack

I know, but I also recall that they hoped to send him up before Gagarin. My thought is that if sending a man on a suborbital hop is every bit as “good” (at least according to the media) as orbiting a man, then why all the fuss over Sputnik?

Well, I know the answer to that — a vehicle that can orbit can do a lot more than one on a ballistic trajectory. But still. Given how the US cheered Shepard, and given the panic after Sputnik, I’m surprised some newspaper didn’t just point out, “Hey, we’ve been flying in space just as long as the Soviets.”

I think you did a pretty good job of answering your own question, Jennifer. The difficulty in defining “outer space” is that any attempt to use objective criteria is bound to fail. Atmospheric pressure drops off asymptotically so it gets to be a p*ssing contest as to what “significant” means. Since the French seem to have taken the role as coordinator for all things aerospacey, they decided to make it 100 Km. Yes, that’s higher (by 12 miles) than our previous definition of 50 miles, but that’s still too low for satellites to fly. At the altitude that the Shuttle flies (roughly 200 Km) the pressure is still about 10 x higher than inside the processing chambers used to deposit circuit layers on silicon.

“Also, is there a reason why we don’t consider the Nazis to have reached space first? We counted Al Shepard as going into space, so why does Sputnik beat out the V2? Or other suborbital rockets?”

First off, most of the aerospace history books I know of do acknowledge von Braun/Dornberger as the developers of the first man-made craft to reach space. The V2 (actually, the official designation is “A4″) flight of 3 October 1943 reached about 165 Km (103 miles) IIRC. That was a ballistic flight, however, and Sputnik orbited. The difference is that to orbit you not only have to get 200 Km or so up, but you have to be going sideways at nearly 30,000 Km/hr. The difference is that it takes something like 100x more energy to get a payload to that altitude at orbital velocity than just to altitude and right back down.

Also, Alan Shepard’s suborbital flight (“Freedom 7″) was about three weeks after the Soviets launched Gargarin.

- Jack

Defining where space begins is a lot like deciding what a so-called planet is. It’s an exercize in sentimentality. No one needs to know where space begins: it’s everywhere. A rocket engineer doesn’t need to know how high up space is; the engineer needs to know where the air gets rare enough to be of little consequence. Even that varies from one job to the next. A hundred miles up a satellite can stay on orbit for days or some weeks before aerodynamic drag decays the orbit. If the sat’s job can be done in that time, then the air is no big deal. The ISS is between two and three times that height; but it is always plowing through extremely thin air. It will fall earthward within months if not occasionally boosted. By some practical criteria, the space station isn’t even in “space”.