Balloon company plans to hold tourists on a protracted visit to space, or close enough to it

Mercedes this morning allow us to understand it’s teaming up with an organization called Space Perspective, which can offer paying passengers a first-class ticket to space via a balloon.

Well, not space. The vehicle they’d fly is trademark-dubbed the SpaceBalloon, however the targeted altitude is 100,000 feet. That is well shy of the 50-mile (264,000 feet) boundary for space recognized by NASA, and even shier of the internationally recognized Kármán Line at 100 kilometers (328,000 feet). Though since the atmosphere simply gets thinner the upper you go, there isn’t any real hard boundary to space, so calling it space is fair game. Air Force legend Col. Joe Kittinger called it a “space environment.” More on him in a moment.

Whatever you call it, that is damned high — 100,000 feet is a serious altitude, thrice higher than the airlines fly. From there, passengers will see the curvature of the planet and the blackness of space. And Space Perspective guarantees they’ll see all this from a gondola — the corporate calls the pressurized capsule Spaceship Neptune — featuring the most important windows ever provided for space tourists. From the renders at the corporate’s website, they appear massive. Better of all, the spacefarers shall be collaborating in a six-hour journey: two hours each for ascent and descent, and two hours at altitude. Other space tourism operations featuring suborbital flights are at peak altitude for mere moments. Though unlike those flights, the balloon customers won’t experience weightlessness as they will not be in freefall. 

More benefits: They’ll get a first-class in-flight meal, cocktails and access to a bathroom. (Undecided if that is a closed system or whether passenger output is predicted to burn up on reentry.)

What’s Mercedes’ role in all this? It is going to provide Mercedes-Maybach electric vehicles to move Space Perspective’s trademark-capital-E Explorers to the launch site. The presence of Maybachs hints on the clientele they are going for — tickets for a flight will cost $125,000. It feels like Maybach may even contribute to the capsule interior design.

Space Perspective calls this the primary carbon-neutral trip to space, though high-altitude balloons use helium, which isn’t a greenhouse gas but is a byproduct of natural gas production. It’s definitely greener than a rocket.

For some perspective on what 100,000 feet is like: In 1960, Air Force Capt. (later Col.) Joe Kittinger rode a balloon to 102,800 feet — after which parachuted from it. He was in freefall headfirst dive for 4 minutes and 36 seconds before deploying a drogue parachute at 18,000 feet. His records for highest jump and fastest speed achieved by a human without an aircraft (614 mph) went unbroken for 52 years.

Here’s Kittinger talking in regards to the jump, and pictures of the jump itself. Fascinating guy, an actual American Hero. He died in 2022 at age 94.

Then in 2012, Red Bull’s Felix Baumgartner rose to 127,852 feet, parachuted, and have become the primary human to interrupt the sound barrier along with his body, hitting 843.6 mph. He opened his chute at 8,400 feet. 

Two years later, Alan Eustace, a retired SVP of engineering at Google, broke Baumgartner’s record, flying to 138,889 feet before jumping, an altitude record that also stands.

In videos of those jumps, you get a way of what 100,000 feet will appear like for Space Perspective’s customers.