Commercial flights to the edge of space by Richard Branson’s Virgin Galactic and Jeff Bezos’s Blue Origin have brought these questions back into fashion, so let’s take a look.
While we were planning and filming an ambitious item for Bang Goes the Theory, in which an 'action man' type-figure dubbed mini-Dallas is sent up to the "edge of space" by a balloon, there was a lot of discussion among the Bang gang about whether or not we could claim to be reaching 'space', and also whether Joseph Kittinger had really "parachuted from space" after his balloon ascent to 102,800 feet (31,333 metres) in 1960.
We got our mini-Dallas to pretty much the same height, but I’m afraid that the answer has to be ‘no’ in both cases, even though the sky looks gratifyingly black in our remarkable camera shots.
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Margaret Hamilton: Spaceship Programmer and Software Pioneer
Read now to access more details of Margaret Hamilton: Spaceship Programmer and Software PioneerWithout the work of the lead Apollo flight software designer, Margaret Hamilton, the Eagle would not have landed on the Moon.
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