From the department of splitting hairs...

Read on sci.space.policy...

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:> :As far as I am concerned, anything suborbital isn´t the real thing.
:> :
:>
:> Then you're out of step with EVERY nation on Earth that has any sort
:> of space capability at all.
:>
:
:What nation are you talking about?
:

All of them.  Name one and it's on the list.  They all define an
altitude beyond which flight is considered 'space flight'.  *NONE* of
them require 'orbital flight' before it's considered space flight.
=====

This is one of the tactics of the "true believers" in space flight which Charlie Stross recently angered.  You get to define all terms in your own way to make it easy to ridicule anybody who disagrees with you here.  See, the person at the top of the thread was trying to point out that there isn't a sensible evolutionary path from sub-orbital to orbital space flight.  What the guy at the bottom is doing is equating the two on an international basis to prove that because everything above 100KM is considered space, then getting from 100KM at Mach 3 to Orbit is easy.

It's an amusing trick to watch and one of the reasons that very few sensible people who used to post on sci.space.policy still do.