Non-paywalled link.

I think if you can get there with a balloon, you're not in space. I'm not sure where the current imaginary line is draw between space and not space but lacking enough atmosphere to support a balloon would be a decent place to do it.

Now straight into contradicting myself - the dude that did the Red Bull jump from a balloon sure looked like he was in space, but I fully support my proposal in the previous paragraph. Also, Yuri has to get extra points for riding a sketchy-ass rocket.

This is also kinda like saying were the Wright brothers the first to fly or was a balloon person the first. I don't think they are comparable. The method of getting there has to be taken into consideration. This is the argument with Blue Origin's rocket that goes high but doesn't even attempt orbit. Is that a defining factor, achieving orbit versus just being high?

Without taking anything away from the achievement of the people who've been there, I've often felt this way about the ISS. They're in free-fall, effectively flying across the planet like in a jet plane. "Proper" space is when you're out of orbit, so by my definition only the Apollo astronauts have been in space.

(Yes, I guess you're always in "orbit" of any body larger than you...)

An interesting and worthwhile perspective on these different achievements. “what counted as visiting space in the cultural sense moved to reaching Earth’s orbit” is doing a lot of work here. Stating the fact seems worthwhile. Gragarin orbited the earth and was the first person to do so.

Furthermore, the focus on the "person" diminishes the achievement of the Vostok program (for which Gragarin is a stand in) and the US space program. I suspect this is intuitively recognized by most even if they cannot articulate it immediately.

The magnitude of complexity required for the Vostok, Mercury, Gemini and Apollo programs are in another league. This is a triumph of the human capacity for technical innovation and organization. There is a reason why these efforts remain unambiguous landmarks for our species.

A few other details…Gragarin and other cosmonauts/astronauts in Vostok, Mercury, Gemini and Apollo programs achieved apogee orbital altitudes in the range of 170 km to >300 km. Gragarin in the above 300 km range. The Kármán line is 100 km. And according to this article the sky is “seen as black” at 24 km. Feels like a significant difference.

And although orbital altitude is not required, Vostok, Mercury, Gemini and Apollo program cosmonauts/astronauts experienced weightlessness (microgravity).

https://kottke.org/plus/misc/images/old-custer.jpg

Eli Cash tag.

Lots of good comments here.

For me, I think that "space" = "negligible atmosphere".

I then define "negligible atmosphere" as "would not support an aircraft, need a spacecraft".

So I do think that the ISS is in space, but by my definition, a balloon can never be in space. It can reach the edge of space though.

I guess this is why we needed an arbitrary measure like the Karman line.

With William Anders's Apollo photographs and Voyager's Pale Blue Dot in mind, another interesting landmark of distance might be that required to see the entire Earth as a complete, full-disc sphere within a human's field of view. A quick search gives the distance to be 22,000 to 36,000 km as when this first becomes possible. About a 10th of the distance to the moon. Geostationary Orbit is ~36,000 km. As noted above, this view has only been seen by a subset of the Apollo astronauts.