If you’re a frequent forward-cabin flyer, you expect certain things: comfortable and spacious seating, reliable Wi-Fi, and quality food with accompanying cocktails. These amenities are commonplace at 35,000 feet, but a new travel company is taking the luxury flight experience to a new height – 100,000 feet.
Space perspectiveThe company, which experienced the world’s first stratospheric balloon flight, completed its first uncrewed test flight on September 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, due in 2025.
Related: Want to stay or visit the space? This exhibition gives a preview
TPG spoke with Space Perspective co-founder Tabor McCallum and interim CEO Michael Savage to learn more about what the company’s unique space tourism brand and experience will be.
What is space perspective?
Without rockets, how does Space Perspective transport passengers into the stratosphere and return them safely to Earth? All this thanks to the spaceship Neptune – a spherical pressurized capsule 16 feet in diameter that can accommodate eight passengers and a captain.
The tour begins at the Marine Spaceport Voyager, a 294-foot-long vessel that serves as the launch and recovery point for Space Perspective’s spacecraft. Voyager currently calls Cape Canaveral, Florida home but is designed to launch from sea-based sites around the world.
According to McCallum, a typical flight will start in the morning (although if you buy a ticket, I believe you will have some influence on your launch time). “We will inflate the balloon so that it is standing above the capsule with the capsule secured on board Voyager,” he explained. “The passengers will then enter the capsule, and we will give a safety briefing, similar to a preflight briefing on a commercial airliner.”
The spaceship Neptune capsule is then gently lifted from Voyager by Space Perspective’s patented space balloon.
When the capsule is released from the launch ship, it will climb slowly for two hours at a speed of about 12 miles per hour, a rate that McCallum likens to riding a bicycle. “Then we’re floating 100,000 feet up at the top of Earth’s atmosphere [the highest altitude of any commercial balloon flight in the world] for a few hours.”
Daily newsletter
Reward your inbox with the TPG Daily Newsletter
Join over 700,000 readers for the latest news, in-depth guides and exclusive deals from TPG’s experts
McCallum continued: “Then we start the descent, which is the opposite of the ascent. We go down for about two hours to get to Splashdown. [where a Splashcone at the capsule’s base will facilitate a gentle water landing] And then the recovery ship is waiting for us at the splashdown location.”
The boats will stabilize the capsule and lift it back to Voyager, a process that takes about 20 minutes.
My toughest question for McCallum has nothing to do with the technology and expertise that made it all possible. I was simply dying to know where the name Neptune came from. McCallum’s answer did not disappoint.
“It came to me in a dream,” McCallum told me. “I literally had a dream saying, ‘It’s the spaceship Neptune.'”
It certainly has a nice ring to it, but true to McCallum’s long history with ballooning and space travel, it also has significant scientific meaning. “The funny thing about the name Neptune is that the atmosphere of the planet Neptune is mostly helium and hydrogen,” he explained. Neptune’s atmosphere is essentially made up of the type of “lift gas” used to lift balloons into the air.
Who regulates space tourism?
When you combine a sea-based launch point and a spacecraft, you get, in McCallum’s words, “a lot of regulators.”
“Everything we have flies and all the ground operations associated with everything that flies is controlled by the Federal Aviation Administration’s Office of Commercial Space Transportation as a spacecraft,” McCallum explained. “And everything we do shipboard is regulated by the Coast Guard.”
Although the FAA does not have a definitive limit for what is considered the edge of space, it classifies any vehicle intended to operate 30 kilometers (or about 98,000 feet) with people inside as a spacecraft.
“Once you get to 30 kilometers or so, you’re essentially in space,” McCallum said. “It’s essentially a vacuum, and you have all the thermal, radiation and navigational concerns of an aircraft.”
Even if Space Perspective were to one day launch from sites outside the US, it would still be regulated as a spacecraft under the 1969 Outer Space Treaty. operate, so we will always be regulated by the FAA,” McCallum explained. Most countries are signatories to the treaty, which gives Space Perspectives the ability to operate worldwide.
Focus on passenger experience
From the moment you disembark to the moment you disembark, Space Perspectives will provide you with the comfort, space and amenities to fully enjoy this amazing experience.
The capsule is surrounded by floor-to-ceiling windows for panoramic views of the scenic journey above Earth. The seats are designed with safety and comfort features to rival any commercial aircraft, and you’ll enjoy world-class food and beverage service while you’re on board.
Even the lavatory, dubbed a “space spa,” would put the lavatory in a first-class airplane cabin to shame. The space spa is beautifully designed with a soothing color scheme and windows that allow for uninterrupted views even when nature calls.
The team at Space Perspectives did not miss a single detail when designing the Neptune capsule And flight experience; This includes the opportunity to work together Sir Richard Branson, who will co-pilot the first crewed flight. Another co-pilot will be McCallum and his wife Jane Poynter, co-founder of Space Perspectives.
“Richard is a very experienced balloonist,” Savage told TPG. Branson’s involvement goes above and beyond the typical investor. “It’s something he’s personally very passionate about, and he brings that expertise to the table along with his commitment to the customer experience.”
While Branson wasn’t formally involved at the start, it’s clear that the team at Space Perspectives shares his passion for exceeding customer expectations. “There are challenges with things like flying the biggest windows in space, but we built it because Jane wanted to experience driving,” Savage said.
Prioritizing the customer experience similarly informed the capsule’s layout. “We originally thought everyone would want a seat in front of their window, and there would be a ring of seats,” McCallum said. “We realized right away that this is a social experience that people want to share with each other and rearranged the cabin into two sets of four hemispherical seats that better facilitate that kind of interaction.”
An extended flight time of six hours also gives guests time to enjoy their time in space. “One of the reasons it’s important to have time is so you can contemplate the amazing views, interact with other people, or catch up on the latest Facebook status update if you want,” McCallum said.
If you want to be among the lucky ones who can tag their Facebook location as “space,” you’ll need $125,000 to buy a standard ticket for a space perspective flight. To date, Space Perspective has sold over 1,800 reservations.
Many of them are for families or groups of friends who want to go on the ultimate getaway, but Space Perspectives has also received some pretty “out of this world” requests. “We already have people who have bought several tickets because they want to fly and see Italy after seeing all of Florida from the edge of space,” McCallum said.
He also revealed that the company has been approached by several artists who want to be the first to release music from space; A passenger wants to remove some seats and put in a grand piano to perform in the space.
Although the journey is designed to last six hours, the capsule can last much longer. “Our long-term road map may include overnight experiences,” Savage said. “We have the ability to design custom experiences, and as we move forward, I’m sure we’ll have a lot of fun things people can do.”
How is it different from other types of space tourism?
Unlike other experiences offered by space tourism companies, the Space Perspective flight is slow and gentle. Instead of fast space travel and the weightlessness and G-forces that come with it, space perspective flight is closer to the experience of flying in an airplane.
It does not mean that the two experiences are in competition with each other. McCallum shared that Branson also sees the two as complementary. “Someone who is too scared to travel on a rocket can do this first,” he said. “They’re such different experiences that it doesn’t really seem like they’re competing.”
“If people want that thrill and go into space to the point where they’re weightless, you can do that and have a great experience,” Savage said. Space perspective, on the other hand, provides the kind of transformative experience that astronauts describe after seeing Earth from a different vantage point.
“Many astronauts will tell you that they became astronauts to explore space, but what they discovered was that their relationship with Earth was forever changed,” Savage explained.
“The slow ascent and descent space perspective gives you a sense of scale that you don’t get from a rocket. You can look out the window and see your neighborhood and then look at your community and your state and realize, ‘Maybe this is Earth. .not as big as I thought and I should have taken better care of it,” he added.
By the end of the journey, passengers will have spent six hours traveling to and from the stratosphere, with two full hours built in to look down on our planet from a vantage point few will ever reach.
Space Perspectives is set on making this life-changing journey accessible to as many people as possible.
“Imagine if every school had a teacher who had actually been in space,” said Savage, whose two sisters are school teachers. “They can talk to kids about space exploration, and that will effect radical change.”
“There are already charities being created to send people like teachers and other leaders into space,” McCallum shared. “There is one called Space for humanity who are raising money to send people on these kinds of experiences. They’ve already sent people on Virgin Galactic and Blue Origin, so there’s a very large and growing philanthropic component to sending people into space.”
The bottom line
Space was once considered the final frontier (at least according to “Star Trek”). Now, Space Perspective will soon take passengers “where no man has gone before” in luxury and comfort.
With high-end amenities, panoramic views and a gentle, six-hour flight to soak it all in, Space Perspective’s stratospheric “atmospheric” journey is redefining the meaning of space tourism.
Related Reading: