The Limb.

In 1961, Yuri Gagarin looked out

the window of Vostok 1.

He saw the atmosphere not as sky above —

but as a thin, bright line

clinging to the edge of the world.

Astronauts call it "the limb."

Scroll to ascend
Sea Level 0 km
Troposphere 12 km
Stratosphere 50 km
Mesosphere 80 km
Kármán Line — Edge of Space 100 km
International Space Station 400 km

"I see Earth! It is so beautiful."

Yuri Gagarin — Vostok 1, 1961

"You develop an instant global consciousness, a people orientation, an intense dissatisfaction with the state of the world, and a compulsion to do something about it."

Edgar Mitchell — Apollo 14, 1971

"You look down there and you can't imagine how many borders and boundaries you cross, again and again and again, and you don't even see them."

Russell Schweickart — Apollo 9, 1969

"It was the death that I saw in space and the lifeforce that I saw coming from the planet — the blue, the beige and the white. One was death and the other was life."

William Shatner — Blue Origin, 2021

Everything you have ever known.

Everyone you have ever loved.

Every human who has ever lived.

All of it, balanced on that line.