Space Perspective reboots vision of flying passengers to stratosphere on a 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. 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, the capsule and the 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 about $125,000, or roughly half as much as Virgin Galactic’s most recently published price for a suborbital spaceflight.
In addition to the bar and the loo, Space Perspective plans to provide a solid...