How High Up Is Space

It s 50 miles for the united states air force it s 60 miles for most people and just recently i saw they wanted to move it up to 75 or 80 miles.

How high up is space. Live space station tracking map. Nasa awards astronaut status for flights above 50 miles. Mesosphere of earth s atmosphere. By the same token space is often defined as beginning at the lowest altitude at which satellites can maintain orbits for a reasonable time which is approximately 160 kilometers 100 miles above.

Hot air balloon altitude record. The map of earth below the tracker shows where the space station is flying directly above. The tracker top map shows where the space station is right now and its path 90 minutes ago 1 5 hr and 90 minutes ahead 1 5 hr. General international consensus sets a similar limit for the start of space as 100km 62 miles or 380 000 feet.

In the us space begins at 80 4km 50 miles or 264 000 feet. Well it depends on who you talk to. From that perspective the international space station which orbits at only 330 435 kilometers above the earth isn t even worthy of its name. But the earth s outer atmosphere also known as the.

The dark overlay indicates where it is nighttime in the world. There s some new body that wants to move it up even higher so that none of us will be flying into space if they get their way. Low earth orbit leo where many satellites live goes from 160km 100 miles 525 000 feet to 2 000km 1 240 miles 6 5 million feet. Satellites that orbit at a higher altitude can orbit for decades or even hundreds of years without slowing down from atmospheric drag.

So it s not that the atmosphere ends at the karman line it s simply that at that altitude it becomes too insignificant to support flights that rely on air quality.