Trending: ‘apogee’

Apogee was among our top lookups on July 20th, 2021, after many accounts of Jeff Bezos’s spaceflight used the word.

The capsule has just reached apogee. Our crew is now experiencing life-changing views of Earth from above the Kármán Line. #NSFirstHumanFlight

— Blue Origin (@blueorigin) July 20, 2021

We define apogee as “the point in the orbit of an object (such as a satellite) orbiting the earth that is at the greatest distance from the center of the earth,” and also as “the point farthest from a planet or a satellite (such as the moon) reached by an object orbiting it.” The word is often contrasted with perigee, which is defined as “the point in the orbit of an object (such as a satellite) orbiting the earth that is nearest to the center of the earth” and “the point nearest a planet or a satellite (such as the moon) reached by an object orbiting it.”

Apogee has an additional figurative meaning, which is “the farthest or highest point, the culmination.”

Bezos' political involvement reached a new apogee in 2019 during the re-election bid of Seattle's socialist city councilwoman, Kshama Sawant, who called Bezos "our enemy" and tried to pass a head tax to fund housing for those displaced by Amazon's Seattle footprint. Amazon spent $1.5 million against Sawant and other progressive candidates, a record at the local level, with more than a dozen of the company's executives contributing to Sawant's opponent. (Sawant won re-election anyway.)
— Branko Marcetic, In These Times (Chicago, IL), 2020 Mar.