World View Enterprises
today executed its first balloon liftoff from Spaceport Tucson, the
Arizona facility that it expects will be the home base for
satellite-like “Stratollite” missions to the stratosphere — and,
eventually, tourist flights as well.
“Spaceport
Tucson, the first-ever purpose-built stratospheric launch facility in
the world, is now open for business,” World View co-founder and CEO Jane
Poynter said in a news release.
World
View operates the facility on behalf of Arizona’s Pima County, which
built the headquarters and production building as well as a
700-foot-wide circular balloon launch pad under the terms of a $15 million deal struck in 2016. That deal has been the subject of legal wrangling for more than a year.
Poynter
said the Federal Aviation Administration recently issued a Certificate
of Authorization to World View for balloon launches, opening the way for
today’s inaugural test.
The
test’s primary objective was to rehearse mission control protocols for
future flights from Spaceport Tucson, located south of Tucson
International Airport.
World View already has conducted balloon launches from other testing grounds in Arizona, including NASA-funded experiments and a widely publicized mission that sent a KFC chicken sandwich into the stratosphere in June. But this was the first to take off from the Tucson facility.
The
four-year-old company’s balloon-borne platforms can rise to altitudes
in excess of 100,000 feet. That’s three times as high as commercial
jetliners typically fly, but only a third of the way to the
internationally accepted 100-kilometer (328,084-foot) boundary of outer
space.
World
View aims to offer stratospheric launch services that can offer many of
the Earth-monitoring capabilities of satellite missions at a fraction
of the cost. The company has a longer-term goal of sending tourists into
the stratosphere on hours-long flights that would provide passengers in
a pressurized gondola with space-like views of Earth and the black sky
above.
The ticket price for World View’s future Voyager flights is $75,000.
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