- An aerospace startup has unveiled the test capsule for its luxury space-tourism experience.
- Space Perspective’s Neptune will take passengers on a six-hour flight to the stratosphere’s edge.
- It’s the latest commercial suborbital-flight spacecraft after Virgin Galactic’s and Blue Origin’s.
The latest offering in space tourism promises to be a lot less bumpy.
Space Perspective, a Florida-based startup, recently unveiled a test capsule for its new Neptune spacecraft. The Neptune is expected to start carrying passengers into the stratosphere — using a massive balloon instead of rockets — as early as next year.
The company touts the pressurized Neptune capsule as “the largest human spacecraft in operation” aside from space stations such as the ISS. It also says Neptune is the third commercial suborbital spacecraft ever built after Virgin Galactic’s SpaceShipTwo space plane and Blue Origin’s New Shepard crew capsule.
The test capsule, called “Excelsior” in honor of the US Air Force space-jump project of the same name, is fully functional but has not been fitted with the final interior design, the architecture-and-design website Dezeen reported. Its on-board amenities are expected to include WiFi, a cocktail bar, and a toilet.
“The space capsule is like nothing the world has ever seen,” Taber MacCallum, a cofounder and co-CEO of Space Perspective, said in a statement. “We are on the cusp of a staggering shift — not only in the way we humans experience space, but also what we conjure in our minds when we think of the spaceship that gets us there.”
Once in commercial operation, Neptune flights are expected to ferry eight passengers and a captain, which the company said will “set the record for the most people taken to the edge of space.”
Space Perspective plans to conduct its first manned test flights by the year’s end and commercial flights for 1,750 ticket holders in 2025.
The company says the unique experience — a six-hour, 18-mile-high balloon trip, rather than the relatively-short flights of its rocket-powered competitors — makes the $125,000 ticket worth it.
“If you can get on a commercial airplane, you can get on Spaceship Neptune,” Jane Poynter, a cofounder and co-CEO of Space Perspective, said in an interview with Space.com. “That actually opens up the market enormously to people who otherwise don’t feel comfortable going on a rocket, or just simply can’t go on a rocket, but still want that extraordinary experience of seeing our Earth from space.”
The company is still working to secure a hydrogen supplier for its balloon propulsion, Dezeen reported.
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