Florida company's space balloon takes big step toward 1st human flight

PORT CANAVERAL, Fla. — The weekend trip was a success for Space Perspective, the company that already has more than 1,800 people waiting for their chance to take balloon rides in a posh capsule up to the edge of space.

The Spaceship Neptune-Excelsior performed its first uncrewed test flight soaring to an altitude of 100,000 feet marking a big step toward the Brevard County space tourism company’s march toward its first trip with humans on board next year.

“I could have been in it,” Space Perspective cofounder Jane Poynter said Thursday while climbing aboard the company vessel MS Voyager that hauled the capsule back into port. “It worked that well. Everything went so well.”

The MS in the ship name stands for “marine spaceport.” It set out last week from Port Canaveral traveling down the coast and into the Gulf of Mexico for the eventual test flight off the coast of St. Petersburg on Sunday.

Many of the company’s 130 employees and their families were on hand to welcome the ship back at port as it docked alongside the likes of SpaceX’s recovery vessels at North Cargo Berth 8 while a lone Carnival cruise ship was docked across the turning basin at the port.

Poynter approached the ship with arms spread wide in a welcoming gesture, a grin ear-to-ear before shouting out welcome-home greetings to many of the 38 crew on board.

The sun gleamed off the 16-foot-diameter, silver metal globe with a teardrop-shaped stem nestled in a cradle aboard the ship like a massive golf ball upon a tee, except also held in place with cables attached to steel trusses anchored to the ship deck.

Reflecting the blue sky and white clouds, though, were the prime feature of the capsule — what the company says are the largest windows ever made for something flying to such heights, designed to offer 360-degree views during flight.

“One of the challenges with spaceflight is, when you’re at altitude and there’s no atmosphere outside, you actually end up having to get rid of heat,” Poynter said. “So the larger the windows, the more heat you have to get rid of because the heat is pouring in during the day, which is when we fly.”

She said the team did a lot of work on different kinds of film for the windows that could keep out the heat, but not change the view.

The altitude achieved on flight is not deemed space, but nearly 19 miles high, which is the company’s goal so customers see the curvature of the Earth and the black of space.

The much-pricier Virgin Galactic suborbital rocket launches venture above 50 miles altitude, what the Federal Aviation Administration deems as having gone to space. Blue Origin’s suborbital New Shepard rockets travel past the Karman line at more than 62 miles altitude — the internationally recognized altitude for having flown to space.

Space Perspective, though, taps into a market that doesn’t require training and can fly much more frequently. Plus the company touts the carbon-neutral aspect of the trips that only need hydrogen gas for the balloon to take flight.

The venture that began in 2019 has picked up pace since 2023 with Poynter saying she expects to be among the first people to fly its first human spaceflight in 2025 with customer flights possible by either the end of next year or in early 2026.

“So 18 months ago, we had barely a part made,” she said. “So it took roughly 18 months to build it, test it, and fly it, which is why I think that’s incredibly fast. I mean, just to say that again, normally it’s years and years and years to develop.”

The company had performed one other uncrewed flight with a stripped-down test capsule back in 2021, but this one was designed to approximate what humans would experience on a trip.

“We had all the pressure-control systems, the thermal-control systems, atmospheric-control systems, the humidity-control systems,” Poynter said. “I mean, basically everything that you would need to have people on board.”

She said the splashdown was about 11 mph.

“It was very gentle all the way through the flight, and it’s going to be very accessible,” she said noting the company’s potential customer base won’t be limited by age or mobility, for the most part.

MS Voyager actually home ports down in Fort Pierce, but for now uses Port Canaveral to pick up and drop off the capsule.

The ship is equipped with what looks like the world’s largest taffy-making machine, a mechanism with a series of four massive rollers that are used to deploy the balloon on liftoff.

The capsule is constructed at the company’s facilities in Brevard County along with the 550-foot-long space balloons needed to bring it to such heights. The capsule hangs another 100 feet below the balloon so it’s 650 feet from top to bottom during flight. It has considerable width as well.

“When all stretched out, the balloon is over 300 feet across,” said Taber MacCallum, the other cofounder of the company. “So you could take a football field, just spin it inside the balloon.”

He said that even though the balloon ascends to an area that is higher than 99% of Earth’s atmosphere, the interior will be similar to a plane ride. The capsules will be laid out like a comfortable lounge with passengers provided meal and cocktail service while having access to Wi-Fi and even a restroom.

“Inside the cabin feels just like you’re in a business jet, except it’s much bigger and a better view,” he said.

The test flight wasn’t without issues, though.

“There’s always things,” he said. “We had some communication anomalies, and we had some control anomalies on some parts of the release systems, and so there was stuff, as any first time out there.”

That said, the endeavor was considered a success, with the capsule decked out with cameras and sensors galore to prove it could maintain cabin pressure and stability while keeping a comfortable temperature within, while also testing out recovery operations after splashdown.

“The main thing that we accomplished was we demonstrated we have a capsule that works,” he said. “It’s thermally controlled, it’s pressure controlled. We have a balloon that will take us to the edge of space that we built ourselves.”

The next step is to pore through terabytes of data collected, view the video footage and compare it to what MacCallum called a digital twin, a computer model that plotted out what the company expected to see in terms of “every aspect of life support, thermal control, structure, pressure, ascent, rate, splash, all these things,” he said.

Changes will then be built into the next capsule.

Once complete, the flights, which for now run $125,000 per person, look to take up crews of eight plus a captain on roughly six-hour flights, which take two hours to get up to altitude, spend two hours hovering above Earth and then two hours down with a splashdown in the ocean.

“I will say that we have got such demand, honestly, the price is probably going to go up before it goes down,” Poynter said. “But obviously, our long-term vision is to really bring this down dramatically.

“Maybe we’ll have another product that we bring online in the future that allows us to really bring the price down dramatically, so that more and more people are able to go and have this incredible experience.”

Its launch plans have shifted since the venture was started. Initially launches were going to be from the former space shuttle landing facility at Kennedy Space Center with landings in the Gulf of Mexico, but now the company is sticking with maritime launch vessels.

“We’re going to be able to fly off of Miami. We’ll do some flights maybe even off of Puerto Rico. We’ll do some flights off of the Gulf side down by the Keys,” Poynter said of the company’s initial plans. “We’ll be able to move around, and it’s going to depend on the time of year as well, because we’ve got to make sure where there’s really good weather.”

Long-term plans plan for a much-grander scale.

“We’ll take it slow at first, but we are planning to get to about 140 flights per location per year, and then have multiple locations around the world,” Poynter said.

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