On Monday, the singer Katy Perry, the TV personality Gayle King, Fight Club star Lauren Sánchez, and a few others took a 10-minute, 21-second ride aboard the New Shepard rocket operated by Jeff Bezos’s Blue Origin aerospace company. For some brief period of time—a mere fraction of the flight’s overall duration—the rocket and its inhabitants reportedly reached or exceeded 330,000 feet of altitude, or what is known as the Kármán Line, a popular but by no means universally agreed-upon definition of the “edge of space.” Bezos himself has made this trip before, as have a few others with his Blue Origin company or with competing outfits; each time, the press deferentially reports that the travelers went “to space” or “to outer space.”
Charitably, let’s grant that the Kármán Line does in fact represent the edge of space. The line’s namesake, scientist Theodore von Kármán, chose it as a rough estimate of the altitude at which a vehicle in flight would no longer be kept aloft by aerodynamic lift, but rather entirely by inertia. OK! Fine. Works for me. Grant that the Kármán Line really is a line, and is the edge of space, and grant that the vehicle bearing Katy Perry, Gayle King, et. al. traveled to and possibly past it. Have they “been to space”?
Here is a parable. On the morning of Sept. 16, 2001, a man (me) was driving westward along Interstate 90 in a slightly beat Toyota Celica that I’d borrowed from my mom for a cross-country trip; on an elevated viaduct the highway and I passed through the city of Spokane, Wash., on our way to Seattle and then Mount Rainier. I do not recall having been slowed by any notable traffic jams that morning—the whole country seemed shocked into stillness by the Sept. 11 attacks five days before—but even so, I must have been within the Spokane city limits for at least five minutes, if the poor job I’m doing of eyeballing the distances on a map right now is any indication. I did not spend the night in Spokane, or grab a bite in Spokane, or even refill my gas tank in Spokane. I didn’t stop at all, in fact! For that matter, I’m not even all that sure I had the windows down. I may not have even taken a single unmediated breath of Spokane’s air.
Have I “been to” the city of Spokane in any meaningful sense? No! I have not. I have not slept there, or sampled the local cuisine, or been for a walk around whatever passes for its lively downtown area. When people talk about the great time they had in Spokane (I’m assuming facts not in evidence), I would not dare butt in to be like, “Oh yeah, Spokane, now there’s a place I have been to.” To say this would be to steal valor. I am not a scumbag.
Whereas the previous afternoon, I’d ended the day’s drive several hours earlier than planned because the city of Missoula, Mont. seemed very scenic and charming as I drove into it, and the weather was unbelievably lovely after a couple days of low clouds and rain, and I was sick of driving through places instead of visiting them. So I got a room at a Holiday Inn Express roughly 0.00000001 yards from the interstate and spent the evening sitting on a dinky little east-facing balcony watching people hang glide off of a nearby hillside; if memory serves, I dined on a local Whopper with cheese. Have I “been to” Missoula? Hell the hell yes I have! I practically lived there! When people talk about going to Missoula within earshot, I can be like, “Hey, you should check out this cool little place I know about, the Holiday Inn Express that I spent 16 hours in 24 years ago. It has a rad view of possibly as many as two (2) hills.” By this the listener then knows that I am a knower of Missoula, as well as a sophisticated traveler.
Let us now return to our question. Have Katy Perry, Gayle King, and the other New Shepard passengers “been to space”? I would argue that they have not. They did not spend the night there, for one thing. When your flight to Minsk has a one-hour stopover in Reykjavik, and you spend that entire hour in Keflavík Airport, you do not tell people that you have “been to Iceland,” unless you are a real piece of crap. What New Shepard’s passengers did was even less than that: It was the equivalent of passing over Reykjavik on a flight, through its airspace—a pathetic 10-minute flight, 100 kilometers or so up and then the same distance back down, right back to the place where they started!—and then telling everybody that you have “been to Iceland.”
What is the threshold for having been to a place? What is the metaphorical Kármán Line dividing an actual visit from one that doesn’t count? A professional fixer type might fly into a city in the morning, do some high-powered business deals, eat a power dinner with other big-shots, and then fly out again without having spent the night. I would allow that, if you have ventured inside of a local establishment and sat down and had a meal—as I did at a Missoula restaurant known as “Burger King”—and at least exchanged pleasantries with a local or two, you can say that you have “been to” that place. Well? Did Katy Perry or Gayle King or Lauren Sánchez go into any local space establishment and sample the cuisine of space? No they did not! By that standard they clearly have not “been to space” at all!
Then again, nobody goes into a local restaurant in the remote wilds of Siberia, but many people have “been to” the remote wilds of Siberia: Anyone would agree that all of the people who have mushed through Siberia on a dogsled or, like, on a reindeer’s back or whatever have meaningfully “been to” that place.
By what standard? Well for one thing they were not inside of a vehicle. They were out in the elements! They filled their lungs with the clear, fresh, icy air of Siberia. That then is the bare minimum for having been to a place: breathing its air, unobstructed. Clearly an American pilot who flew over Siberia inside of a spy plane could not tell their buddies they had been to Siberia—not because this might violate the Espionage Act, but because it would not be frickin’ true! Francis Gary Powers had not been to Russia until his plane was shot down.
Neither Katy Perry nor Gayle King nor Lauren Sánchez may say that they have been to space! At no point did they step outside and draw a nice deep breath of space air. That is the absolute least one must do to be able to claim, truthfully, that one has been to a place. For this reason, the next group of famous rich people who ride Jeff Bezos’s rocket up to the Kármán Line should be sure to do this.
