Former NASA shuttle commander Mark Kelly — also known as the other half of former Rep. Gabrielle Giffords (D-Ariz.) — announced Sunday he was joining a space startup called World View as Director of Crew Operations. World View's plan: to take customers 100,000 feet up in a capsule that dangles from a giant helium balloon.
That height, roughly 19 miles above the surface of the earth, is considered the end of the atmosphere, though space itself doesn't technically start until 62 miles up. But 19 miles is far enough up that you can see stars, and a globe-like look to the ground below. "I'm excited to give people the opportunity to do something only astronauts have done before," Kelly told Mashable. "Until you've experienced that yourself, you really have no idea. Words and photographs never do it justice ... The stars are bright and they don't twinkle."
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Kelly has some time to help develop the capsule: World View isn't expected to start flights until 2016. It will, however, start taking reservations later this week — at $75,000 a ticket.
That may be too rich for most travel budgets, but it's a bargain compared to the $250,000 you'll have to cough up for a ticket on Virgin Galactic's SpaceShipTwo. Virgin gives you a very fast rocket-based flight with 10 to 15 minutes of weightlessness at the top; World View promises 90 minutes on the way up, starting just before dawn, and an hour-long drift back to the sunrise-covered Earth via parachute.
"Our flight is gentle," promises World View co-founder Jayne Poynter. "You don't need to withstand the G-force." For some well-heeled space tourists, she says, the experience will be a gateway drug to full-on rocket-bound flight. This video gives some sense of what the experience in the capsule will be like:

Poynter was one of the designers and crewmembers for the Biosphere 2 experiment, an attempt to survive in a hermetically sealed biome in the Arizona desert. It was on a tour of Biosphere 2 a decade ago that she first met Kelly and Giffords. World View has been hampered by the high price of helium — the same thing that torpedoed San Francisco's Zeppelin company, Airship Ventures — but Poynter says the market is catching up, and more natural gas companies are starting to capture the lighter-than-air gas. Kelly, a former Navy pilot, flew four shuttle missions for NASA — two as pilot and two as commander. He says that astronauts tend to have profound emotional experiences when they first see the Earth from above — but almost never talk about it. "We’re busy being worried about safely operating the spacecraft," he says. "All that other stuff is barely discussed. But everybody who’s had the opportunity to see earth as planet has taken away something from that experience." Image: World View Topics: astronaut, NASA, space, space balloon, Tech, U.S., World View
Poynter was one of the designers and crewmembers for the Biosphere 2 experiment, an attempt to survive in a hermetically sealed biome in the Arizona desert. It was on a tour of Biosphere 2 a decade ago that she first met Kelly and Giffords. World View has been hampered by the high price of helium — the same thing that torpedoed San Francisco's Zeppelin company, Airship Ventures — but Poynter says the market is catching up, and more natural gas companies are starting to capture the lighter-than-air gas.
Kelly, a former Navy pilot, flew four shuttle missions for NASA — two as pilot and two as commander. He says that astronauts tend to have profound emotional experiences when they first see the Earth from above — but almost never talk about it. "We’re busy being worried about safely operating the spacecraft," he says. "All that other stuff is barely discussed. But everybody who’s had the opportunity to see earth as planet has taken away something from that experience."
Image: World View