
The world can't agree where space begins, and 20 km of dispute now matters
The 100 km Kármán line is a 1960 convention, the physics gives different answers depending on the question, and the band in dispute now has customers and weapons in it.
Writer
Lachlan Brown writes for Space Daily across Space and Missions, Universe, Earth and Life, Science and Engineering, and Human Factors.

The 100 km Kármán line is a 1960 convention, the physics gives different answers depending on the question, and the band in dispute now has customers and weapons in it.
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Thieves mail stolen fossils back to Arizona rangers with confessions of bad luck, creating an ever-growing pile that can never be returned to the ground where it belongs.
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Planck's 2013 universe inventory assigned 4.9% to ordinary matter, 26.8% to dark matter and 68.3% to dark energy, within the standard flat ΛCDM model.
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A 2012 pre-existing-disk model required an earlier tilt to keep Uranus's moons prograde, while later impact-generated-disk models restore a viable one-collision path.
Aug 23, 2026

Joint MAVEN and Tianwen-1 observations identify Kelvin-Helmholtz wave packets as a bursty route by which oxygen-bearing ions escape the Martian atmosphere.
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Webb's 2023 H3+ spectrum measured Neptune's upper atmosphere at 358 plus or minus 8 kelvin, far below Voyager 2's 1989 estimate, but two snapshots cannot yet explain what drove the change.
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A NASA-led model found shaded lunar south-pole niches where Earth microbes could remain viable for days. Aspergillus niger led on ultraviolet tolerance, but survival did not mean growth.
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New Horizons saw Pluto’s layered organic haze scatter sunlight blue in a calibrated look-back view, even though the particles themselves were probably grey or red.
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The far side's thicker crust impeded magma, but GRAIL and Chang'e-6 show that heat, chemistry and lithospheric cooling also shaped the Moon's unequal faces.
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