In just a matter of months, tourists in Arizona will have a new destination to check off their bucket lists: the stratosphere.
World View Enterprises, a Tucson company, announced on Monday plans to create a space tourism business, with the goal of sending travelers up — into near-space — via capsules pulled aloft by massive balloons.
The flights will last between six and 12 hours as patrons take in the views from 100,000 feet (about 19 miles) off the ground. Tickets cost a mere $50,000 each, but the company plans to make financing options available. Pre-sale tickets are on sale now, so interested customers can place a deposit to claim a spot in line.
The first World View space tourism trips are expected to launch in 2024.
Capsules will hold eight passengers at a time plus one pilot onboard and one inflight concierge. There will also be in-flight food and beverage service, a high-speed data connection, cameras, telescopes, personal viewing screens, reclining seats and, most importantly, a lavatory.
Ryan Hartman, CEO of World View, said the eventual goal is to create seven spaceports around the globe that will serve as hubs for additional tourist activities. The first spaceport will be built near Page, Arizona for its proximity to the Grand Canyon.
Additional spaceports are slated to go near the Great Barrier Reef in Australia, near the aurora borealis in northern Norway, near the Great Pyramid of Giza in Egypt, near the Serengeti in Kenya, near the Amazon in Brazil and near the Great Wall of China.
The business model will be similar to that of a cruise, where the base ticket grants access to the capsule, but trips can be augmented to include additional, terrestrial excursions and experiences to stretch over several days.
“To us, we have this unique opportunity available to us to intersect technology with a purpose,” Hartman said. “It's hard to not get excited about that.”
The purpose driving both Hartman and the rest of the World View team is to grant travelers a new perspective on the planet they call home.
“The idea that we can put people in a position where they can see the planet without borders, they can see the planet without race, they can see it as something bigger than themselves and, I'll say most importantly, that they see it as a living organism, it's really, really an inspiring thing for us to be working on.”
Hartman said the goal is to make this type of travel accessible to more people, not just the incredibly wealthy, and the company is working with nonprofit Space for Humanity to make that happen. Virgin Galactic and Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin are cagey about providing exact prices for tickets on their aircraft, but both reportedly cost at least $200,000.
While it may be significantly cheaper than other options, World View’s $50,000 price point will still be unattainable for most people when median household income in the U.S. is only about $67,000.
Famous founders
World View was founded in 2013 by chief exploration officer Alan Stern, who was previously the principal investigator of the New Horizons mission to Pluto that launched in 2006, and by Jane Poynter and Taber MacCallum, two members of the original Biosphere-2 crew that participated in a two-year mission from 1991 to 1993.
U.S. Sen. Mark Kelly was also among the founding team at World View and though he has since left the company he still has a small stake in it, as reported by the Arizona Republic last year.
Arizona fought tooth and nail to keep World View from decamping to New Mexico or Florida a couple years ago. As part of an incentive package to keep World View in Arizona, Pima County agreed to invest up to $15 million to build out Spaceport Tucson, the company’s primary launch site and headquarters.
Current CEO Hartman took over in 2019. He said the company had raised about $40 million in private capital since 2018 after raising $26.5 million that year and $15 million in 2016.
Hartman said the company currently has 65 employees and it plans to reach 90 or 100 by the end of the year and 200 by the end of 2022.
World View already has more than 100 flights under its belt, including a recent test that saw 20,000 pounds (double the weight of a single capsule) taken up to 103,000 feet, which Hartman said is a world-recording setting feat.
Aside from previous business experience at Raytheon and Boeing subsidiary Insitu, Ryan also has flight experience; He served as an aviator in the U.S. Navy on a P3 Orion aircraft.
Correction: Due to incorrect information supplied to the Business Journal by World View, an earlier version of this story incorrectly stated the company would launch its space tourist trips in 2023.
