Submitted via IRC for SoyCow1984
Virgin Galactic's SpaceShipTwo reaches space for the first time
Virgin Galactic has come a long way since its tragic 2014 crash. The company's SpaceShipTwo has reached space after months of testing, flying to an altitude of 271,268 feet before returning to Earth. The stay was brief (SST fired its rocket for all of a minute), but it was enough to both verify the spacecraft as well as conduct four NASA-backed scientific experiments that studied the effects of microgravity and devices that could handle life support and counteract vibration.
[...] Actual passenger flights aren't likely to happen for some time. Virgin stressed that it wanted to finish its tests "safely," not just quickly. The successful visit to space makes that more a question of when than if, though, and suggests that Richard Branson might be vaguely realistic when he talks about hopping aboard his own flight within months.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by The Shire on Friday December 14 2018, @08:27PM
80km is a NASA designated boundary for calling someone an astronaut. 100km is the Kármán Line which is another fairly arbitrary marker from the FAI. Neither is honestly what most of us consider to be "Outer Space" though it technically is. Considering it's 384,000km to the moon which is considered very close, 100km seems like not a whole lot more than a transatlantic airline.