Richard Branson’s Edge of Space Flight - Begrudgery in Action?

How is driving forward a new industry in space that will ultimately lead to technological advancement through new commercial opportunity and help break the last horizon of humanity, that being space, a "vanity project"?

All these people need to be cheered not begrudged.

All advancements like air travel for example are too expensive at the innovation phase for ordinary people but over time as technology improves and innovation happens it becomes affordable for everyone.

Can't get more socially distanced though.

Can anyone explain how launching four people in a capsule to the very edge of what we consider space, makes progress from which future generations can benefit? It's been done already. Many times. There's nothing ground-breaking here.

Commercial/tourist spaceflight is not an avenue we want to be exploring right now. We need to be drastically reducing emissions, drastically reducing air travel and finding ways to make it unnecessary but more efficient when it is necessary.

We do not need to be exploring avenues whereby wealthy people can go on jollies to the edge of space, spewing out pollutants behind them.

Space exploration; the placing of machinery and people on other celestial bodies; great. Billionaires getting their ego wanked with a space flight; no way.

Who has the bigger one ?

Or more importantly who's stayed up longer ?

That's a PR move. To claim that the rocket is environmentally sound while just ignoring the toll on the environment to get it to that point.

Hydrogen in particular is not free, it takes considerable amounts of energy to produce it.

Space tourism will use the cheapest, nastiest fuel available.

And maybe we'd be better of if we hadn't upgraded from the horse and cart. Our species wouldn't be facing down potential extinction.

Did both Branson and Bezos craft go beyond the Earths exosphere, or did it just hug the earths atmosphere? See, I think there may be a major problem in any sort of further sort of deep space exploration endeavours (which these lads are being credited with advancing) concerning the earths magnetosphere. I suspect that the human body cannot handle any sort of prolonged period beyond the Earths magnetospheric layer, which the human body and brain has been tied to for the last 200,000 years. I suspect this is why NASA stopped the Apollo missions. They say it was due to lack of money but I'd be suspect of that, I think the actual reason is the human mind can't handle it. If it is about money I'd like to see both Branson and Bezos go out much further. See what happens. They have the money for it so let them be the guinea pigs for it.

There's no real point where the atmosphere "ends". It just gets continuously less and less dense the higher up you go. It's so light as to be barely perceptible, but even the ISS has to fire boosters every now and again to counteract the drag from the very light atmosphere pulling it back.

Even out as far the moon there are probably still a few oxygen and nitrogen atoms hanging around in earth orbit which could theoretically be called "atmosphere".

To solve this issue of what is and isn't space, certain boundaries have been marked. The one that distinguishes being "on earth" from being "in space" is the Karman line, which is 100km above sea level. It's relatively arbitrary; the difference in density at 99.5km and 100.5km is minimal, but you need to draw a line somewhere. :)

My understanding is that Branson hit 90-something KM, Bezos hit 106/107 km. This kind of makes sense, since Blue Origin are building commercial rockets for orbital operations, whereas Branson is building commercial passenger vehicles which do not need to go into orbit.

Ah look. My point is that with the benefit of hindsight, we now know that the unhindered technological progress and innovation since the industrial revolution has come at a heavy price, caused untold and potentially irreversible damage to the ecosystems we rely on to live.

It is no longer acceptable to say that progress has a price and to suck it up. We can no longer just keep marching forward with new innovation without asking what the cost is and without examining how to mitigate the impact before we mass-adopt it.

I can't see rocket propulsion getting any cheaper.

It's quite possible that even jet travel may be priced out of reach of the common man over the coming decades. If not sooner.

[quote]It's quite possible that even jet travel may be priced out of reach of the common man over the coming decades. If not sooner.[\quote]

Why? The technology is there for green energies, so it should get cheaper.

The answer is pretty self explanatory. Unless a new way to propel aircraft, besides fossil fuel, is made commercially viable then the price of jet air travel will inevitably have to increase over time.