Skip to main content

Arizona Votes To Build Spaceport For Space Ballooning


The high altitude balloon company World View Enterprises reached an important milestone today, when Arizona’s Pima County voted to award them a $14.5 million deal to build a spaceport. Jane Poynter, CEO of World View, told TechCrunch that this vote comes after a yearlong, nationwide search for a World View headquarters location.
The core competency of the company is its ability to bring payloads up to 100,000 feet and safely back down to the ground. Today’s spaceport decision will enable it to expand testing and development work in an effort to ramp up payload flights.
Taber MacCallum, World View’s CTO, noted that Arizona was particularly well-suited for the company’s business. Arizona has consistently good weather, making regular balloon flights more reliable. Also, in-air traffic issues aren’t likely to be an issue because nearby military bases ensure that the air space is well controlled.
World View's high altitude balloon with pressurized capsule / Image courtesy of World View Enterprises
World View’s high altitude balloon with pressurized capsule / Image courtesy of World View Enterprises
The payloads that World View could accommodate could include anything from cameras that look down for remote sensing, to telescopes that look up for astronomy experiments, to paying customers themselves. To date, World View has launched technology payloads with NASA, Northrop Grumman and the Department of Defense.
In addition to technology payloads, the company can also fly humans to the edge of space. Back in 2014, the company provided the technology for Google executive Alan Eustace to conduct the highest free fall is history.
The company is perhaps most famously known for its “World View Experience,” which is a high-altitude balloon ride for people who want to view the Earth from the stratosphere and softly glide back down to the Earth.

According to World View, their passengers would gently lift off in a pressurized capsule, complete with Wi-Fi and a bar, that would hold six passengers and two crew members. During the ascent, the helium would expand in the balloon as the pressure inside the balloon attempted to equalize with the low-pressure of the high-altitude atmosphere.
After a couple of hours, the passengers reach their peak height at 100,000 feet at which point the balloon would be fully expanded. The capsule would then “sail” the stratosphere for around two hours.
When it’s time for the capsule to return home, the pilot descends by venting the helium and eventually detaching from the balloon itself. The pilot would guide the capsule back to the ground using a ParaWing (similar to a paraglider).
Although crewed flights won’t begin until late 2017 or early 2018, you can purchase World View Experience tickets today for $75,000. The company isn’t releasing details on the number of tickets sold at this time, but Poynter said that they already have customers from all around the world, some of whom are even 80 years old.
She emphasized that the space tourism opportunity that they offer is unique compared to other options out there because it’s an “extremely gentle” experience. It’s also a fraction of the cost of suborbital space tourism companies like Virgin Galactic where tickets run $250,000.
However, it’s not entirely fair to compare the two. Virgin Galactic plans to send people into space (328,000 feet) on a rocket, whereas World View is simply giving people a better view of Earth and space (at 100,000 feet).
Illustrated view from World View's capsule / Image courtesy of World View Enterprises
Illustrated view from World View’s capsule / Image courtesy of World View Enterprises
World View is offering an inherently different, more relaxed experience that is open to the young and the elderly alike…as long as they have $75,000 to spend.One cannot actually send someone into space in a balloon, but it is an interesting niche in the emerging space tourism market. Suborbital space flights are more of an extreme sport, where the passenger experiences high levels of G-forces in order to float in space for a few minutes. With these more extreme flights, the passengers have the additional benefit of going home with bragging rights: they’re now considered astronauts.
Before World View can launch paying customers, they’ll need to get certified by the FAA by testing out their technology. To date, the company has successfully completed the World View Experience flight profile with a one-tenth scale model of its capsule. A full-scale capsule is set to be tested this summer, and crewed test flights will begin in the summer of 2017. Commercial flights are projected to begin by 2018.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Square’s New Apple Pay And Chip Card Reader Available To Pre-Order

Shortly after going public,  Square  announced that its new card reader is now available to pre-order on  its website  for $49. The new reader will ship in early 2016. It’s been a slow roll-out for the company’s new reader as Square first teased it at Apple’s WWDC in June. Compared to the good old Square reader that you put in your headphone jack, this one packs a few new features. First, it supports Apple Pay, and potentially other contactless payment systems. It has an NFC chip and a tokenization system for secure contactless payments. Second, the new bigger design comes with a new slot for chip cards in case you can’t pay with your phone. Finally, it’s a wireless reader that connects to your phone or tablet using Bluetooth. It has a small built-in battery and you can recharge it with a standard microUSB port. According to  Square’s website , 100 retailers are already using the new reader. But the company has yet to ship the new rea...

Report: Amazon Is Building An App To Let Normal People Deliver Packages For Pay

Amazon is apparently enlisting everyday humans in its network of endless online shopping delivery. The WSJ reports that the ecommerce giant is working on an app internally that would allow the average consumer to make a little cash by picking up Amazon packages at various retail locations and dropping them off at their final destination. WSJ’s sources did not have a timeline for the release of this product, internally called ‘On My Way,’ and were unsure whether it would launch at all. Amazon has spent years not only iterating the way it tailors your online shopping experience — the mega retailer has one of the best suggestion engines in the business — but also the way that it gets you your products with speed and convenience. Besides the standard shipping (or two-day for Prime members), Amazon has fiddled with the idea of letting Uber drivers and yellow cabs deliver products same-day, as well as using bike messengers and third-party delivery services for Prime N...

The data center of the (near) future

Tight budgets and explosive data growth call for creative thinking on how and where to build data centers:   http://dell.to/1tv4FsL #datacenter     #modulardatacenter    #floatingdatacenter    http://techpageone.dell.com/technology/the-data-center-of-the-near-future/?dgc=SM&cid=75909&lid=5342172#.U_6lTvldXfJ

The EHang 184 Is A Human-Sized Drone Taking Off At CES

We’ve seen some pretty cool stuff on day 1 of CES 2016, but probably nothing more eye-catching than the EHang 184, a human-sized drone built by the Chinese UAV company  EHang . Yes you heard right — a giant autonomous drone that fits a human. It’s basically what you would expect to see if someone shrunk you down to the size of a LEGO and stuck you next to a DJI Inspire. Except no one was shrunk, and the giant flying machine was sitting smack in the middle of the CES drone section. EHang, which was founded in 2014 and has raised about $50M in venture fundingto date, was pretty gung-ho about telling everyone at CES that the 184 was the future of personal transport. And for the most part, people were too in awe to question them. But the reality is that the company probably was using the 184 as more of a marketing tool for their standard-sized drones like the  Ghost . Not that we’re saying that the 184 will never be a real thing, just that it probably isn’t co...

Windows 10 build 10136 screenshots posted by Windows Insider chief

We are used to seeing leaked screenshots of unreleased Windows 10 builds coming from third parties. However, it’s rare when a member of the Windows team does it himself. Today, Gabriel Aul, the head of the Windows Insider program, did just that on his Twitter account with two screenshots showing Windows 10 build 10136. Currently, Microsoft has build 10130 available for the over 4 million Windows Insider members to check out. There’s not a lot that’s new in these two new images, although the system tray arrow and File Explorer icons have both been updated. One of the images also shows that Word 95 can indeed run inside Windows 10. Microsoft has already announced that Windows 10 will officially launch, or more accurately come out of its preview stage, on July 29. Earlier today at Computex 2015, the company announced there will be about 300 products running the operating system by the time it debuts. Via:  Windows Central ,   Gabriel Aul