Back in 2016 I wrote about World View, a company that wanted to send space tourists up into the stratosphere inside of a capsule tethered to a balloon.
Here’s what I had to say about it at the time:
“Yesterday I attended the kickoff conference for the sixth annual Arizona SciTech Festival! It was a great day as I learned about biomimicry, touched a meteorite, and discovered that the person who invented the lie detector also created Wonder Woman. But for me, the highlight of the day was the keynote speaker: Jane Poynter. A former Biosphere inhabitant along with Pauley Shore, she now has her sights set on another enclosed space: an eight person pod tethered to a balloon that will take adventurous souls twenty miles above the surface of the Earth to the edge of our atmosphere!
Known as World View, her space tourism company has already completed a successful test flight and is backed by several big names including astronaut Mark Kelly, one half of the famous flying Kellys. (His brother Scott is the one who spent a year in space so that NASA could compare the two brothers and see how space travel affects the human body). They’re also backed by famed planetary scientist, Dr. Alan Stern among others. It would be easy to get on board with this project when you consider all of that brainpower at work behind the scenes. What’s not going to be so easy, for me at least, is actually getting on board. Seeing as how I’m afraid of heights and all.”
Fast forward to 2020 and it appears as though World View has pivoted away from space tourism and towards satellite imagery. But Poynter’s dream lives on with a new venture: Space Perspective. With the exact same goal that World View had originally.
As Travel and Leisure puts it:
“It’s up, up, and away for Space Perspective, the latest spaceflight startup set on sending tourists to the stars. The company officially opened its Launch Operations Center at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center last month. But unlike most of its competitors, it isn’t using rockets or space planes to bring people to space — it’s using balloons. Space Perspective, co-founded by Jane Poynter and Taber MacCallum, plans on gently lifting its passengers — or ‘explorers,’ as the company prefers to call them — 100,000 feet into the sky aboard Spaceship Neptune, a reusable pressurized capsule raised by a 650-foot-tall, hydrogen-filled balloon.
“Following the return of human spaceflight from U.S. soil just a few weeks ago, people have never been more excited about space travel,” MacCallum said in a statement. ‘Few endeavors are more meaningful than enabling people to experience the inspiring perspective of our home planet in space for the betterment of all, and that’s what we are accomplishing with Space Perspective.’
Using a balloon as a method of transportation means that the leisurely round-trip journey from takeoff to splashdown will be approximately six hours, with about two hours spent at the 100,000-foot cruising altitude. (Like NASA’s Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo capsules, as well as SpaceX’s Dragon capsule, Spaceship Neptune will gently land in the sea.) This flight time is markedly different from other spaceflight companies like Virgin Galactic, whose flights on the spaceplane SpaceShipTwo will last about two and a half hours, and Blue Origin, whose flights on the New Shepard capsule will only last about 11 minutes.
And, of course, using a balloon also means that passengers won’t be subjected to intense G-forces of a rocket launch, making the ride much, much easier on the body. On top of that, Spaceship Neptune will come furnished with a bar and bathrooms to round out its luxe experience.”
So, what do you think?! Would you be willing to become an “explorer” and witness the view of Earth from high up in the stratosphere?! Or like me will you let your fear of heights get the best of you? Either way, there doesn’t appear to be any shortage of options. The era of Space Tourism is almost upon us.
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