Carol Scribner and her late husband Larry were among the first to pay $125,000 each for a seat on the upcoming flight into the edge of space offered by the company Space Perspective. For the couple, there was practically nowhere else to go as voracious travelers who had been to 170 countries. Now that flight seems closer to reality: with the completion of the test capsule just announced, the company is aiming to begin commercial flights in 2025.
“We so yearned to travel to space,”Scribner says. “Because of our age and some health problems, the programs available weren’t possible for us. When we learned of Space Perspective and that the only requirement would be that you were fit to travel on a commercial airline, we immediately contacted the company. It was a dream of ours and now it was within our grasp.”
With the capsule now complete, a series of uncrewed test flights will begin soon off the coast of Florida, according to Jane Poynter, Space Perspective’s co-founder and co-CEO, with crewed test flights scheduled for later this year. “Our test capsule is highly instrumented and represents what we will be flying once commercially operational,” she says, “minus the luxurious interior, which we call the Space Lounge, and the restroom, which we call the Space Spa.”
Poynter and her husband Taber MacCallum, co-founder and Chief Technology Officer of the company, both longtime veterans of spaceflight technology development, have been working on this project for over a decade. “Our mission is to take as many people as possible into space because we know that looking down on our beautiful planet from the blackness of space – the quintessential astronaut experience – will radically shift one’s perception of our world and humanity’s place within it,” she says. “Astronauts often return from missions with a fire inside them to create positive change, and many get involved in environmental and societal causes. Often referred to as the Overview Effect, we call it the Space Perspective.”
To develop the space vehicle, they enlisted personnel who had previously worked on spacecraft with NASA, SpaceX, Boeing, Virgin Galactic, Blue Origin and the U.S. Navy. The capsule they developed, Spaceship Neptune-Excelsior, is very different from the other commercial space vehicles: larger than Virgin Galactic’s SpaceShipTwo, Blue Origin’s New Shepard and SpaceX’s Crew Dragon at 16 feet in diameter and 2,000 pressurized cubic feet of interior space allowing it to transport eight people. The windows of the capsule are also larger, vertical- allowing for continuous panoramic views- and designed to protect from harmful sun wavelengths, to control the heat in the cabin and to maintain the veracity of the colors on view above and below.
The major differences, though, are how far up the spaceship goes and how it gets there: 18 miles up (outer space begins at 62 miles up known as the Kármán line) and propelled gently by the SpaceBalloon they’ve created without the G force stress of rocket propulsion and weightlessness. The acceleration will be a gentle 12 miles an hour and the trip’s duration will be six hours, allowing enough time to engage in cocktails and an upscale dining experience in a leisurely fashion along with WiFi to livestream what the explorers, as the 1,750 ticketholders so far are called, are seeing. Reentry is expected to be just as gradual, touching down on the ship Marine Spaceport Voyager that also served as the launch vessel, due to be completed in the next few weeks.
This extremely gentle process is the reason that this space experience seemed possible for Carol Scribner and her husband. When he passed away two years ago, though, she gave his seat to her son. But she then met a man very much like her husband who had also been a world traveler and wanted to go to space. Her son gave up his seat to allow her and Gerry, now her fiancé, to go together.
“But it won’t be just us,” she says. This journey is going to be incredibly memorable, not just for me but for the large international family my late husband and I collected together. They’ll be hearing the stories and seeing the pictures—I’m a photographer. We’re going to bring this world and experience to them. And I know Larry will also be on this trip in some cosmic way…the three of us will experience the world we live in in a way that we haven’t seen before.”