SLOW AND STEADY INTO SPACE
“If you’re looking for the fury and vibration of a rocket, you’ve come to the wrong place,” says Jane Poynter, co-founder of Space Perspective. “Our Spaceship Neptune offers a gentle ride into space that lets clients absorb the astronaut experience.”
The football-field-sized space balloon carrying the bulbous cabin into the sky at 19km/h (picture the pace of a leisurely bike ride) is in marked contrast to the thunderous Flash Gordon blast-offs of Virgin Galactic and Blue Origin. Spaceship Neptune’s swanky, pressurised lounge is a panopticon of windows and includes a bar and bathroom. There’s even Wi-Fi. Instead of G forces gluing flyers to their seats, eight passengers and one pilot will sit in recliners, chatting and sipping cocktails as they gradually zoom out on Kennedy Space Center – Spaceship Neptune’s home port – until it becomes the Florida peninsula, then the East Coast and, eventually, a grand view of Earth.
Tested and used by NASA, high-altitude balloons have been around since the 1930s, when they were first employed for research and adventuring. Poynter and her husband, Taber MacCallum, co-founder of Space Perspective, developed and launched the space balloon that carried Alan Eustace to his recordbreaking parachute jump of 135,980ft in 2014.
Spaceship Neptune’s 100,000ft climb technically won’t reach space, but Poynter says it replicates the suborbital rocket experience (what Sir Richard Branson experienced during his historic July flight aboard Virgin Galactic’s spaceplane VSS Unity, minus the weightlessness) but with a lot more luxury, while still giving passengers incredible views of the curvature of Earth below and the blackness of space above. Splashdown pick-up is via boat. After a successful test of its prototype in June, Space Perspective began selling tickets for flights beginning in 2024, at a cost of US$125,000 per seat.