Soaring to new frontiers: Space Perspective plans first manned flight for 2025

27.12.2024 - 22:19 / thepointsguy.com

If you are a frequent forward-cabin flyer, you come to expect certain things: a comfortable and spacious seat, reliable Wi-Fi, and a quality meal with an accompanying cocktail. These amenities are commonplace at 35,000 feet, but a new tourism company is about to take the luxury flight experience to all-new heights — 100,000 feet, to be exact.

Space Perspective, the world's first stratospheric balloon flight experience company, completed its first uncrewed test flight Sept. 15, 2024. The successful test flight marked a major milestone, and it paved the way for future commercial flights and the company's first manned flight, which will take place in 2025.

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TPG spoke with Space Perspective co-founder Taber MacCallum and interim CEO Michael Savage to learn more about the company's unique brand of space tourism and what the experience will entail.

Without a rocket, how does Space Perspective transport travelers to the stratosphere and return them safely to Earth? It's all thanks to the Spaceship Neptune — a spherical pressurized capsule measuring 16 feet in diameter that can accommodate up to eight passengers and a captain.

The journey begins at Marine Spaceport Voyager, a 294-foot-long vessel that acts as the launch and retrieval point for Space Perspective's spacecraft. The Voyager currently calls Cape Canaveral, Florida, home but is designed to launch from marine-based sites across the globe.

According to MacCallum, a typical flight will start in the morning (though if you purchase a ticket, I assume you will have some sway over your launch time). "We'll inflate the balloon so it's standing up over the capsule with the capsule secured to the deck of the Voyager," he explained. "Then the passengers will enter the capsule, and we'll give a safety briefing, similar to a preflight briefing on a commercial airliner."

The Spaceship Netptune capsule is then gently lifted from Voyager via Space Perspective's patented SpaceBalloon.

When the capsule is released from the launch vessel, it will gently ascend at about 12 miles per hour for two hours, a rate at which MacCallum likened to bicycling speed. "Then we stay floating on top of the Earth's atmosphere at 100,000 feet [the highest altitude of any commercial balloon flight in the world] for a couple of hours."

MacCallum continued: "Then we begin the descent, which is sort of the reverse of the ascent. We go down for about two hours to get to the splashdown [where a Splashcone at the capsule's base will facilitate a gentle water landing] and then the retrieval ship is waiting for us at the splashdown location."

Boats will stabilize the capsule and lift it back onto the Voyager, a process