By Aaron Miller-
Florida-based Space Perspective is taking reservations on its Spaceship Neptune for flights in early 2024 at the price of $125k per person, with each trip holding eight passengers and a pilot.
Space Perspective’s first flights will take off from Florida involving six-hour trips will involve a two-hour gentle ascent above 99% of the Earth’s atmosphere to 100,000 feet. There’ll then be another leisurely two hours for passengers to enjoy the 360-degree views from the cabin before the spaceship makes its two-hour descent to the ocean, where it will splash down safely. Voyage to shore will be completed by ship.
The spaceship was designed in collaboration with UK design studio PriestmanGoode.
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“We looked at all the different elements that would make the experience not just memorable, but truly comfortable as well,” Nigel Goode, designer and cofounder of PriestmanGoode said last year. “We wanted to make sure that passengers would be able to get 360-degree unobstructed views and that we created an efficient space that would enable them to move around during the journey.”
The balloon-borne pressurized capsule will take travelers to an altitude of 100,000ft, where they’ll be treated to incredible views of Earth through panoramic windows. It’s conceived as a somewhat luxurious experience, with a bar on-board for those who fancy a pint in space and a far gentler ascent than one would feel on a rocket.
‘We’re committed to fundamentally changing the way people have access to space – both to perform much-needed research to benefit life on Earth and to affect how we view and connect with our planet,’ Space Perspective founder and co-CEO Jane Poynter said last year, as per CNN.
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Last Friday, June 18, the company launched its first test flight from the Space Coast Spaceport in Florida, next door to NASA’s Kennedy Space Centre. The uncrewed flight reached a height of 108,409ft, taking six hours and 39 minutes before splashing back down in the Gulf of Mexico.
In a statement, Co-CEO Taber MacCallum said he ‘could not be more proud of the performance of the team and the flight system. It was spectacular to witness the teamwork and the high level of expertise yield such a successful result’.
‘This test flight of Neptune One kicks off our extensive test flight campaign, which will be extremely robust because we can perform tests without a pilot, making Spaceship Neptune an extremely safe way to go to space,’ he added.
‘It is an incredible privilege launching from the space coast, where the history of human spaceflight was forged over the past decades and continues to build momentum today. Flying on Spaceship Neptune will be an extraordinary experience for our Space Explorers,’ Poynter added.
NASA pays the Russian Space agency $81m for its astronauts to take a round trip in the Soyuz capsule. Elton Musk has announced a space trip that will fly passengers around the moon at a rumoured $175 million a ticket.
Virgin Galactic, meanwhile, is taking booking for its space flights at the much reduced rate of $250,000. For this, passengers fly to 50,000 feet in a vehicle tethered to a plane. Rockets are then fired, and the space craft accelerates into space where the passengers experience weightlessness before reentering the earth’s atmosphere and landing.
A fortnight ago, a trip into space with Amazon founder Jeff Bezos has sold for $28m (£19.8m) at auction.The anonymous bidder will get to fly with Mr Bezos and his younger brother Mark on his rocket company Blue Origin’s maiden voyage next month.
Their identity will be revealed in the coming weeks ahead of lift-off in West Texas on 20 July – the 52nd anniversary of the moon landings.
It will be the first time Mr Bezos’s New Shepard capsule will have people onboard and will mark the launch of his space tourism business
The money from the bid will be donated to Blue Origin’s Club for the Future, which promotes science and technology among young people, a company spokesperson said.Jeff Bezos and his younger brother Mark will be on board the maiden voyage
It is not clear when Blue Origin will be open for commercial business, but ticket sales and price lists are due to be available soon.
Mr Bezos is set to beat his rival Richard Branson and his space enterprise Virgin Galactic in being the first person to make space travel available to the public.
Space Perspective claims that the process will be simple as boarding an airplane and that the pressurized capsule offers what it describes as a “shirt-sleeves environment” (although with its plans to host weddings and other events, it could also be black-tie).
The lavatory, it claims, is “the loo with the best view in the known universe,” and is located in the center of the capsule in the splashdown cone.
Space Perspective’s co-founders Jane Poynter and Taber MacCallum previously designed the air, food and water systems for the Biosphere 2 space base, in which they lived for two years.
“Our advanced space-balloon is designed to operate in the near vacuum found at the edge of space,” says Space Perspective’s website. “NASA has used similar balloons for decades for flying large research telescopes.”
As helium is in limited supply and needed for critical medical applications, Spaceship Neptune uses hydrogen. “The lift gas inside the balloon is lighter than air and allows Neptune to float on top of the Earth’s atmosphere like an ice cube on water,” says Space Perspective.
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