A New Space Travel Company Is Offering Cheaper, Safer Flights

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2021-06-23 19:00:02

(Bloomberg) -- Let go of a balloon, and it will float up into the air, ascending higher and further away until it’s eventually out of sight. And maybe—if it’s a very special balloon—it will reach the stratosphere.

That’s the simple, underlying idea behind the latest space travel venture. Space Perspective aims to use giant “space balloons” to bring eight people at a time to a 19-mile-high (30.6-km-high), pitch-black lookout for $125,000 views of the planet Earth. Its tourist flights go on sale on Wednesday, June 23, after a private pre-sale period that has already sold out at least three initial trips—all slated for takeoff in 2024.

The company’s co-founders, Jane Poynter and Taber MacCallum, met while taking part in Biosphere 2—the famed, failed experiment of the early ’90s that explored the viability of human life in outer space. For two years in the Arizona desert, they lived with six others in a glorified greenhouse set up for completely self-sustained living, modeling what it would be like to set up a commune on Mars, for instance.

Since then, the pair has served as technical advisors to Elon Musk on human space flight, founded a tech company focusing on life support systems for space exploration, and helped Google engineer Alan Eustace set a record in 2014 for the highest space balloon flight ever recorded: 135,890 feet (41,419 meters), about 25.7 miles.