How to watch Branson’s flight, which Jeff Bezos is still hopping mad about
Enlarge / Jeff Bezos and his girlfriend Lauren Sanchez pose for a picture during their visit at the Taj Mahal in January 2020. (credit: PAWAN SHARMA/AFP via Getty Images)
Virgin Galactic is continuing to make final preparations for the historic flight of its VSS Unity vehicle on Sunday morning, carrying the company's founder, Richard Branson, and three other employees. To that end, on Friday, the company announced that it will have a livestream, hosted by Stephen Colbert and featuring a new song by Khalid, to publicize the flight into space.
But wait, is it really space? Amazon founder Jeff Bezos says Virgin Galactic's flights above 80 km are not space.
In a pair of salty tweets on Friday, Bezos' space company, Blue Origin, took potshots at Virgin Galactic and its rocket-powered space plane. "From the beginning, New Shepard was designed to fly above the Kármán line so none of our astronauts have an asterisk next to their name," the company tweeted. "For 96% of the world’s population, space begins 100 km up at the internationally recognized Kármán line."