Stratospheric balloon
Space Perspective’s balloon-borne capsule, known as Spaceship Neptune, would provide a wide-angle view of the Florida coastline. (Space Perspective Illustration)

The space entrepreneurs who planned to send passengers ballooning into the stratosphere for astronaut’s-eye views of the Earth below, way back in 2013, have revived the idea for a new venture called Space Perspective.

Co-CEOs Taber MacCallum and Jane Poynter unveiled their concept for a balloon-borne capsule called Spaceship Neptune today, and said that uncrewed test flights are due to begin early next year.

“Good things take time,” MacCallum joked during an interview with GeekWire in advance of the big reveal.

Seven years ago, he and Poynter had a similar unveiling for World View Enterprises, an Arizona-based venture that aimed to fly people to an altitude of 100,000 feet, at a price of $75,000 a ticket. That altitude is much lower than the internationally accepted space boundary, which is 100 kilometers or 62 miles, but it’s high enough to gaze at a wide-angle landscape spread out beneath a black velvet sky.

Since 2013, World View has pivoted to sending up uncrewed payloads on balloon platforms known as Stratollites. Last year, Poynter and MacCallum brought in a new management team to head World View’s operations, leaving them free to plan their next venture.

After commissioning a study of the travel market, they found that stratospheric travel was still the right answer for what they were looking for.

Space Perspective’s initial base of operations would be at Kennedy Space Center’s Launch and Landing Facility, where NASA’s space shuttles used to touch down.

The experience would be unlike the relatively short-duration, rocket-powered ride promised by Virgin Galactic or Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin space venture.

Up to eight passengers and a pilot would climb into a spacious pressurized capsule for a two-hour ascent to the 100,000-foot level, lofted by a huge, hydrogen-filled balloon at the leisurely pace of 12 mph.

After a two-hour cruise at that altitude, Spaceship Neptune would take another two hours to descend to a splashdown in the Atlantic Ocean or the Gulf of Mexico. A ship would pick up the passengers, capsule and balloon, and return them all to shore.

Because the trip would last six hours, the capsule design leaves room for a bar ⁠— as well as an airplane-style toilet stall that would be recessed beneath Spaceship Neptune’s passenger cabin. “It will have the best view of any loo in the world,” Poynter promised.

Some of the plan’s details are still up in the air, so to speak, but Poynter said passenger flights are pegged to begin around 2024. She expects the price of a ticket to be in the range of $125,000, or roughly half as much as Virgin Galactic’s most recently published price for a suborbital spaceflight. Although deposits aren’t yet being taken, interested parties can get in a virtual line for reservations via Space Perspective’s website (which was overloaded just after today’s announcement).

In addition to the bar and the loo, Space Perspective plans to provide a solid wireless internet connection to ensure that passengers will be able to share their experiences on social media in real time. “It’s the ultimate Facebook status update,” MacCallum said.

Scientific payloads could also fly on Spaceship Neptune for a price. Although weightlessness isn’t an option, experiments could focus on such topics as atmospheric science, solar physics, astrobiology and infrared astronomy.

As they launch their new venture; MacCallum and Poynter can draw upon almost 30 years of far-out experiences, starting with their participation in the Biosphere 2 closed-environment experiments of the early 1990s. After that joint venture, they got married and went on to found Paragon Space Development Corp. in 1993, followed by World View in 2012.

In 2014, Paragon and World View were part of the StratEx team that helped former Google executive Alan Eustace execute a world-record stratospheric parachute jump from a height of 135,890 feet. Now Eustace is a member of Space Perspective’s board of directors.

Another member of the board is Kirby Harris, co-founder and managing partner of Base Ventures, which is Space Perspective’s lead investor. Jeff Hoffman, a former NASA astronaut who is now an MIT professor, serves as senior technical adviser.

Space Perspective has a lease agreement with Space Florida, the state’s aerospace and spaceport development authority, to put its first operations center at Kennedy Space Center, and it has a Space Act agreement with NASA for access to the space agency’s facilities and workforce at the Cape.

The Federal Aviation Administration’s Office of Commercial Spaceflight will regulate Space Perspectives’ passenger flights. And although the first passengers won’t be boarding until several years from now, Space Perspective already has a partner for those flights: Space for Humanity, a nonprofit group that’s working on space research missions as well as a citizen astronaut program.

“Space for Humanity is cultivating a movement to expand access to space for all of humanity, and this partnership represents a big leap in making that happen,” Dylan Taylor, founder of Space for Humanity and CEO of Voyager Space Holdings, said in a news release.

In addition to launching from Kennedy Space Center, Space Perspective says it’s planning another flight facility at Cecil Spaceport in northeastern Florida. If the venture succeeds in Florida, MacCallum and Poynter are hoping to expand operations to Alaska, Hawaii, the Mediterranean and other locales.

Only about 20 people have been to the region of the stratosphere where Space Perspective plans to go. But if Poynter and MacCallum follow through on their years-old vision, thousands could get the astronaut’s-eye view from that vantage point.

Poynter said it’s more important than ever to widen people’s perspective in an age marked by challenges ranging from a worldwide pandemic to a looming climate crisis. “These planetary issues deserve a planetary perspective,” she said.

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