Adventure travel is looking up...literally. Tucson-based World View Enterprises plans to bring tourists willing to pay $75,000 each for a balloon ride roughly 100,000 feet above earth.
The company is still developing the pressurized capsule and the balloon for future sub-orbital space travelers. Tickets will hit the market soon but flights might begin in 2016. The journey to the edge of space will take about 90 minutes. Once up there, passengers will be able to admire the view for two hours. The capsule will then disconnect from the balloon and will start its free fall relying on a parafoil and the atmosphere of the planet for safe glide and landing back to earth.
"Seeing the Earth hanging in the ink-black void of space will help people realize our connection to our home planet and to the universe around us, and will surely offer a transformative experience to our customers," said World View CEO Jane Poynter in an interview.
"We look forward to pioneering this new, accessible and affordable space flight regime, and to sharing the breathtaking, once-in-a-lifetime experience with people from around the globe," she added.
The altitude the World View's balloons will reach is far from the 328,000 feet altitude which scientists can call as space travel. The trip offered by World View won't be high enough for travelers to be called an "astronaut" but the experience will most likely be similar.
World View's price tag is comparatively cheap compared to Virgin Galactic's rocket-ride to 360,000 feet for $250,000. A company in Spain called zero2infinity is also looking to offer a gondola ride to 100,000 feet above Earth's surface.
Poynter, together with her husband Taber Mac Callum, are the founders of World View's mother company, the Paragon Space Development Corporation. The latter is not new to space explorations as it has helped in the development of life support systems for spacecrafts. The couple is also involved with Inspiration to Mars, a dream project to send people to space and fly by Mars by 2018.
The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) said Tuesday that the capsule proposed by World View for the stratospheric trip will be considered as a space vehicle, and should, accordingly, follow the governing rules for commercial spaceflight.
