Virgin Galactic is continuing to make final preparations for the historic flight of its VSS Unity vehicle on Sunday morning, carrying the company’s founder, Richard Branson, and three other employees. To that end, on Friday, the company} announced that it will have a livestream, hosted by Stephen Colbert and featuring a new song by Khalid, to publicize the flight into space.
But wait, is it really space ? Amazon founder Jeff Bezos says Virgin Galactic’s flights above 80 km are not space.
In a pair of salty tweets on Friday, Bezos’ space company, Blue Origin, took potshots at Virgin Galactic plus its rocket-powered space plane. “From the beginning, New Shepard was designed to fly above the Kármán line so none of our astronauts have an asterisk next to their name, ” the company tweeted. “For 96% of the world’s population, area begins 100 km up in the internationally recognized Kármán line. ”