That article calls Yuri Gagarin the first person in outer space, I take issue with that as to me outer space is not 327km away, that is within the thermosphere - an area today used by astronaughts in the ISS (~410 km), being within the earths atmosphere (however barely) are LEO, Low Earth Orbit. Low being the operative word. Even a HEO only goes to 36,000 km. Only Apollo missions have gone beyond this, and the exosphere past that (~600 km - 190,000 km). The moon is 360,000 - 405,000 km away.
So is beyond the exosphere outer space? Not to some.
Wikipedia states that 100 km is the line for internation space treaties, and calls it outer space beyond that. So possibly, but I could've edited that ten minutes ago to read just 1m.
For NASA I can't find anything stating where they say outer space starts. You'd think if one government dept. would know, and say, this information it'd be them.
Ed Stone, one of the lead guys behind Voyage 1 says that Voyager 1 will be in outer space once it has left the solar system (heliosphere), it is currently ~11bn miles away - and that still isn't quite into outer space!
I think it's up to each individual to decide where outer space starts for them, I'm still undecided, but it's definitely not 327 km away.
(This post is not intended to belittle anything acheived by Gagarin, or other astronaughts since.)
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Last edited by Herr-Berbunch; 02-07-13 at 10:38 AM.
Reason: To delete three zeros, so I don't look totally stupid!
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