There’s a new player in the bustling world of “commercial space,” although the “space” part in this case is a matter of definition.
A Tucson-based start-up plans to use a helium balloon to lift big-ticket customers in a pressurized capsule to nearly 100,000 feet. That’s a journey to the edge of space, if not into space as traditionally defined.
Price point: $75,000. The eight passengers on board would presumably come from the same customer pool that feeds high-end luxury vacations, such as round-the-world golf tours.
“The sky’s going to be completely black. You’ll be able to see the curvature of the Earth,” said Jane Poynter, co-founder of Paragon Space Development, which has lined up investors for the new venture, World View Enterprises. World View hopes to begin the balloon flights in three years.
The Federal Aviation Administration announced Tuesday that, for purposes of regulation, the World View capsule will be treated as a space vehicle, because it will be built to operate in outer space. “The FAA will not address the more difficult question of whether Paragon’s proposed altitude of 30 kilometers constitutes outer space,” the FAA stated.
The company promises a “truly transformative human experience.” A World View statement Tuesday said the company would offer “spectacular human flight into nearspace, unlike any other suborbital spaceflight experience being offered today, allowing passengers to remain aloft for hours at a comparably affordable price.”
There’s no distinct boundary between the atmosphere and space. Rather, the atmosphere steadily thins with altitude. On tourism trips, the World View balloon would rise to a little less than 19 miles above the surface. (It would go higher on scientific missions, Poynter said.)
One commonly referenced boundary of space is the Karman Line, named for Hungarian American scientist Theodore von Karman. That’s at 100 kilometers, or about 62 miles, and is approximately the altitude above which aerodynamic flight is impossible, even in theory.
But in the minds of the people behind World View, they’re getting into space tourism.
“In essence, we’re a spacecraft. In fact, we’re a spacecraft,” said Paragon co-founder Taber MacCallum.
Poynter and MacCallum are well known in the entrepreneurial space community. Back in the early 1990s they spent two years as “bionauts,” sealed inside Biosphere II, a massive, greenhouse-like structure in the Arizona desert. Their company, Paragon, has had contracts with NASA for life-support technology.
The field of commercial space has been growing in recent years. Virgin Galactic, backed by billionaire businessman and adventurer Richard Branson, hopes to carry passengers on suborbital flights in 2014. Virgin Galactic will use a rocket-powered vehicle called SpaceShipTwo, still in testing, that is designed to reach altitudes above the Karman Line. The company has sold nearly 650 tickets in advance. The company’s ticket price recently jumped to $250,000 a seat, up from $200,000.
“Three years ago or so, it became clear that there’s a space tourism industry. It seems to be bigger than Branson’s personality,” MacCallum said.
Paragon also is working with billionaire Dennis Tito on his Inspiration Mars plan — a 500-day mission that, if technically feasible, would send two astronauts in a fly-by of Mars during a rare alignment of the planets five years from now.
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