
A World View from Space
Voyager Capsule, test flight nr. One
The Science of a healthy life
Just recently I talked about making love up in space, far off of planet Earth on another planetary surface, or tucked away inside any number of ISS like space stations. But there are other, more tranquil ways of reaching space for a romantic date or even a family trip. One such option is to silently (and slowly) take World Views luxurious balloon capsule on a journey that leads you almost the entire way up to space.

Photography by Mike Koontz
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Come let us meet, World View from Tucson, Arizona
75 000 US$
This past weekend (Oct 24) the US-based company managed to reach a major milestone with a test flight that went 100,000 feet ( 30,624 meters ) high into the air. Come 2017 and they will be conducting the first human flight into space. Do you remember reading about a world record dive from space in 2014? That one-time project that culminated with Alan Eustace setting a world record dive from 135,908 feet is what these guys are building their soon to be commercial space balloon travel company off of.
[gives you
wifi in space]
Tickets will not come cheap once (if) world view get it´s public space travel agency up and running. At least initially tickets will go for around 75 000 US$. And that price of admission gives you a 2-hour long journey from earthly soil to space. And unlike taking to the sky in a rocket it will happen exactly as serene as any hot air balloon travel do. Just with you and additional extras sitting inside a comfy highly luxurious capsule looking out at the grandness taking place outside. A romantic and short adventure, complete with airy and comfortable interiors, wifi and all the earthly things you could want to consume. This trip is about leisure and comfort while you set out on experiencing a once in a lifetime trip.
Short Quote
And if you think that such a price tag on something yet to be launched would keep people from lining up. According to World View tickets are already selling and entire families are already waiting in line. And really, who can blame em. While I don't care about the possibility of making a Facebook update, getting to create such a moment, and memory on your own or with anyone of your choice, my god, who would not marvel from the inside out from that. Having said that. Please do take note, as high up as you are.
Purely from a factual point of view, you are still not outside of Earths atmosphere.
So you are not really a genuine space monkey the same way you will be the day you traverse the skies up to the ISS space station, the moon or mars or any other soon to be space travel option. Of course very few will care about such semantics seeing that you are so close to actual space while you float above Earth´s gorgeous curvature. But it is at least a fact that you should be aware of, and especially so if for you it´s less about enjoying the experience and more about actually having traveled to space.
World View Website, space tourism in a balloon
Technically
[it is
still
Earth]
The test flight took place with a replica of the soon to be real thing. A smaller, but still 1,000-pound heavy prototype of the Voyager Capsule complete with all the technology you will find in the final version. The milestone included doing things such as measuring wind conditions and other tests.
In total, the ascend took about two hours to complete, and the test version spent another hour or so at it´s intended altitude of 100,475 feet before slowly descending back down to Earth.
“We've had families sign up and buy the whole capsule,”blockquote>
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Photography by Nasa, The Blue Sky of Pluto - “Who would have expected a blue sky in the Kuiper Belt? It’s gorgeous,” said Alan Stern, New Horizons principal investigator from Southwest Research Institute (SwRI), Boulder, Colorado.
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