IGY Bulletin, Number 1, July 1957 - The Earth satellite program

The opening paragraph of this Bulletin article reads: 

"The USNS-IGY [U.S. National Committee] earth satellite program is designed to provide an observatory on the upper atmosphere over a wide range of latitudes and for an extended period of time. Besides functioning as an observatory by virtue of its instrumentation, the satellite itself may be observed from the ground for several additional scientific purposed."

The U.S. and the Soviet Union both planned to launch satellites during the IGY. I won't go into many details of this article (you can download it as mentioned two and three posts ago and read for yourself) because the U.S. program did not go quite as envisioned when this article was written. More later.

In any case, the IGY satellite programs, along with the exploration of Antarctica, were probably the most visible and exciting portions of the IGY for the general public.

What does it mean to get to "outer space," anyway? According to NOAA (the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration), a common definition of where outer space begins is above the Kármán Line, an imaginary boundary 100 kilometers (62 miles) above sea level. Once this threshold is crossed, the atmosphere becomes too thin to provide enough lift for conventional aircraft to maintain flight.

The U.S. military and NASA define space differently, as starting 12 miles below the Kármán Line, at 50 miles above Earth's surface. Pilots, mission specialists and billionaires in space who cross this boundary are officially deemed astronauts.

The different layers of the atmosphere are illustrated below.

from NOAA

According to the Bulletin article, the U.S. satellite was planned to reach an altitude at apogee between 800-1500 miles. The orbit was to be determined using photographic and radio observations.

On July 11, 2021, Richard Branson traveled as a passenger onboard Virgin Galactic Unity 22 to a peak altitude of 53.5 miles (space for NASA, but not for NOAA). Nine days later, Jeff Bezos flew on his Blue Origin craft to a peak altitude of 66.5 miles (space for NOAA as well as NASA). Jeff Bezos said afterwards: "I want to thank every Amazon employee and every Amazon customer because you guys paid for all this," which is why I try not to shop Amazon!

Speaking of people in space, I think the first scary movie I saw in a theater was First Man Into Space (1959, just after the IGY, already in the satellite era but before Yuri Gagarin became the first real person in space), which I saw with my sister and friend Brough. Between the three of us, during the scary scenes we went to the bathroom, waited in the lobby, and hid behind the chairs. According to the story, ambitious test pilot Dan Prescott flew his rocket-powered craft as higher than 250 miles above the Earth's surface without authorization. The texture of the astronaut's skin after it was scarred by exposure to cosmic dust still creeps me out. You can watch the whole movie (in pretty crisp resolution) on YouTube:

Prescott's dying words: "I just had to be the first man into space." So whether you are Jezz Bezos flying into space or one of his lowly Amazon consumers, caveat emptor!