Talk:Kármán line

Should the article be revised now the US Department of Defense also recognises the 100 km boundary?
Currently the article extensively discusses the US military's position on the 50 miles / 80 km boundary, though it is only implied to have accepted this boundary due to the astronaut definition and the retroactive free molecular flow consideration. Yet neither of these has any official status, and there seems to be no evidence that the 50 miles boundary is used in an official capacity whatsoever with all US government organisations either recognising the 100 km boundary (FAA, NASA) or being ambiguous about it (US delegation to UN COPUOS). Some of the references used to present this view are quite dated or not sourced directly from a public organisation.

Now, since at least November 2021, the US Department of Defense has explicitly adopted the 100 km boundary as well in the Dictionary of Military and Associated Terms: "Space domain: The area surrounding Earth at altitudes of greater than or equal to 100 kilometers above mean sea level". A PDF version of the dictionary can be found here on the website of the Federation of American Scientists: https://fas.org/irp/doddir/dod/dictionary.pdf Previously the DoD did not take an explicit stance, as previous versions of the same publication did not include such a definition, though the related air domain was defined in the 2014 version as "The atmosphere, beginning at the Earth's surface, extending to the altitude where its effects upon operations become negligible" which implies 'space' to be beyond that undefined altitude.

With the DoD seemingly being the final major American actor to explicitly adopt the Kármán line, and the current position in the COPUOS likely being a discussion on legal boundaries of sovereignty rather than the definition of the edge of space discussed in the article, do you think a rewrite of the article is in order in which alternative to Von Kármán are mentioned but the 'US being the exception' is removed and the aforementioned uses of the 50 miles boundary are more clearly presented as implied reasoning rather than official views? SabasNL (talk) 13:38, 30 June 2022 (UTC)

March 2023 edits
I believe the latest changes are made in good faith, but is in need of an expert before we commit them to the page.

The chief reason is that the article has been changed in a major way: from making clear there is no internationally agreed upon limit that is legally binding to describing the Karman line as a done deal: "the conventional line" and then discussing the importance of defining the edge of space in the context of "this is that definition". But it isn't.

Yes, defining the edge of space is is important for legal and regulatory purposes. But the Karman Line is not the accepted answer.

I have provisionally rolled back to the previous version where our article isn't as categorical. If a third party, preferably an expert in the field, were to look at the changes and reapply them, I would not object further.

To Deeday-UK: thank you for your good-faith edits. Please hold off further edits to the article for a week or two. If nobody has taken action or commented here, feel free to reapply your changes, as silence is consensus. Regards, CapnZapp (talk) 03:31, 15 March 2023 (UTC)


 * I'm not an expert, but I agree that the edits seem to be too categorical. On the other hand, the previous version (an attempt to define) goes perhaps a bit too much the other way. Maybe we can find a compromise between the two... Rosbif73 (talk) 07:44, 15 March 2023 (UTC)
 * This can be easily accommodated by saying e.g. that "The Kármán line is a proposed conventional boundary between Earth's atmosphere and outer space", instead of the conventional boundary, and then adding earlier on that there is no universal agreement on where this boundary should lie, and that a widely accepted value is the one set by the FAI at 100 km. I'm going to reword it along this line, unless there are strong objections. --Deeday-UK (talk) 11:58, 18 March 2023 (UTC)

Water'n it down
It seems there's been a long-term effort to water down the relevance and established nature of the Karman line, which might be politically-aligned POV-pushing.

The lede used to say:

"The Kármán line lies at an altitude of 100 km (approx. 62 miles) above the Earth's sea level, and is commonly used to define the boundary between the Earth's atmosphere and outer space.[2] This definition is accepted by the Fédération Aéronautique Internationale (FAI), which is an international standard setting and record-keeping body for aeronautics and astronautics."

This turned into:

"represents both the attempt to define a boundary between Earth's atmosphere and outer space, and offers a specific definition set by the Fédération aéronautique internationale (FAI), an international record-keeping body for aeronautics."

and later:

"is an attempt to define a boundary between Earth's atmosphere and outer space, and offers a specific definition set by the Fédération aéronautique internationale (FAI), an international record-keeping body for aeronautics."

and currently:

"is a proposed conventional boundary between Earth's atmosphere and outer space set by the international record-keeping body FAI (Fédération aéronautique internationale) at an altitude of 100 kilometres (54 nautical miles; 62 miles; 330,000 feet) above mean sea level. However, such definition of the edge of space is not universally adopted."

—ReadOnlyAccount (talk) 23:15, 28 March 2024 (UTC)

"The Kármán line is mainly used for legal and regulatory purposes"
The fuzziness of this has caused the Wikipedia editor collective considerable difficulties.

As I understand it, there actually is no one Karman line that everybody agrees to. What we're talking about is the idea of there being one. So it's more "The idea of a Kármán line is mainly used for legal and regulatory purposes" because surely laywers and regulators can't use what doesn't exist. CapnZapp (talk) 08:43, 30 April 2024 (UTC)