A whole lot of very, very rich and famous people are going to be making their first trips into “space” in the next year or two.  There are essentially three private companies getting launches out the door:  Amazon, Tesla, and Galactic.  These aren’t their actual company names but you all know the three lunatic billionaires behind all this.  These genius businessmen / ten year old boys are going to send people up there for millions in coin per ticket.  Plus they’ll go up on their own.  Bezos is going first.

There’s also an effort to send people up to the ISS.  There are currently two competing movie companies sending Russian and American film teams up to the ISS to shoot C grade movies that’ll look like trash.  I think Tom Cruise is the American guy, because of course.  This is not a joke.  He’ll get space madness (his normal demeanor) and treat everybody around him like human garbage (also his normal demeanor) before the drunken Russian botanist puts him out the airlock.  Then Cruise will get what he always wanted, seven billion people always able to look at him for all eternity.  But seriously, Tom’s a talented fun actor.

But, what exactly is the barrier of space?  As in, when are you actually in space.  Though behind a play wall, The Economist gives a pretty good background for the accepted definition.  But apparently there really isn’t an accepted definition.  It’s between 80-100 kilometers up depending on who you ask.  BUT, this is not enough altitude to actually put you into orbit.  You get up there, see the black, feel some lack of gravity, but you end up coming straight back down to Earth like an artillery shell.

So if Bezos goes up there in his rocket, and only feels weightlessness for a few minutes, and then immediately comes back down on a parabolic trajectory is that actually space?  No.

We propose a new definition of space.  We’ll call it the Arcturus Space Definition Those Who Disagree Will Be Purged First (ASDTWDWBPF):  You have to reach orbit, and then complete a single orbit.  Then you’ve been to space.  Anything less than that, in terms of altitude or length of time in space, then you haven’t been to space.

Gagarin completed a single Earth orbit 70 years ago.  He went to space.  If you want in on the space club, you have to match Gagarin’s flight at minimum.  Otherwise, you’re a fraud and total loser.

Unrelated picture of a Bond villain who’s actually not going to get to space.  So Bond is unimpressed, ignores nonexistent space travel, takes the day off, gets blasted in a Moscow bar, toasts Gagarin, takes three Russian women back to his hotel room.