World View Enterprises, the company developing a commercial high-altitude balloon system to provide a flight [...]]]>

A view of the Earth taken from an altitude of 36 kilometers (120,000 feet) on a World View test flight June 18. The company plans to use that balloon to fly research payloads later this year. (credit: World View)

World View Enterprises, the company developing a commercial high-altitude balloon system to provide a flight experience like some aspects of spaceflight, has selected an initial group of research payloads that will fly on one of the company’s balloons as soon as this year, as the firm diversifies beyond tourism.

The three experiments, announced in a company press release July 28, are a radiation measurement experiment by Space Environment Technologies, a meteor imager from the SETI Institute, and a student-built ozone monitor from the Florida Space Grant Consortium. The three are slated to fly in late 2014, according to the company.

“In the research and education world, we think we offer something really special,” said Alan Stern, a founder of World View and the company’s chief scientist, in a speech at the NewSpace 2014 conference in San Jose, California, on July 26. Experiments can be automated or, in later crewed versions of World View’s balloon, human-tended. “We can let researchers operate the same way that they do in a university of industrial lab, removing the need for automation.”

These three experiments will fly on the Tycho-800 balloon, which the company flew on its first test flight in mid-June. At that time, World View chief technology officer Taber MacCallum said the company had gotten early interest in using that balloon for technology demonstration and other research. “It looks like that, early on, we could be in the business of doing experiments and test flights,” he said at the time.

Stern said in his NewSpace speech that the company has also seen interest in using the balloons as commercial platforms beyond research and tourism. “In addition, there’s a very large interest that we’re seeing in something called ‘stratollites,'” which he defined as high-altitude balloons performing missions traditionally done by satellites, but at much lower costs. These applications could include both remote sensing and communications; in the latter case, companies like Facebook and Google have expressed interest in stratospheric platforms (balloons and UAVs) as a means of providing Internet access.

“The interesting thing from our perspective, starting this off as a company with an interest only in research and education and tourist markets, how often we find other businesses and government agencies knocking on our door” to see how they could use a balloon platform like World View, Stern said. “We think of the stratosphere as a greenfield, ready for development with the technology of the 21st century.”

World View, though, is still planning to fly tourists, with those flights slated to begin in late 2016. “It’s going to be a tremendous experience,” Stern said of those flights, which will carry six people and two crew into the stratosphere with amenities not found in spacecraft. “This is the only spaceship that I know of that’s got a bar.”

World View Enterprises, the company that [...]]]>

A view of the Earth taken from an altitude of 36 kilometers (120,000 feet) on a World View test flight June 18. The company plans to offer similar views to customers of its balloon flights, which will be licensed as launches, starting in late 2016. (credit: World View)

World View Enterprises, the company that revealed plans last year to fly customers into the upper stratosphere and do so licensed as a launch vehicle, announced a milestone in its vehicle development Tuesday with a successful high-altitude test flight of a 10% scale model of that system.

The test vehicle, called Tycho, flew to an altitude of 36 kilometers (120,000 feet) on a balloon flight June 18 that lifted off near Roswell, New Mexico. The vehicle then descended to 15 kilometers (50,000 feet), where it deployed a parafoil to glide the rest of the way back to the surface. That flight, the company said, set the record for the highest parafoil flight ever.

World View officials said they were pleased with the test, particularly with the performance of the parafoil. “We were really surprised at how well it flew,” said Taber MacCallum, chief technology officer of World View, in an interview late Monday. “We had a good deployment and a very stable flight, so we were thrilled.”

MacCallum said the World View team was still “crunching data” from the flight, but noted it was likely the company would follow up this flight with another of the same system, this time deploying the parafoil from an altitude of 30 kilometers (100,000 feet). That would test the “emergency abort” scenario of the full-scale system where the vehicle has to leave the balloon without descending.

After that, he indicated World View would likely move head with a full-sized system. “On the balloon side, it’s pretty scalable” to a full-size system, he said. “The 10-percent parafoil is numerically scalable and the control system is the same, with different software settings. So we think right now we can do a 10-percent to full-scale jump, but looking at the data and maybe some more test flights will let us know for sure.”

A parafoil deployed on World View’s June 18 test flight. The flight set a record for the highest flight of a parafoil. (credit: World View)

Tycho, which weighs a couple hundred kilograms and is the size of a small refrigerator, was developed for this test flights, but MacCallum said they’ve received interest in flying it for research and technology demonstration. “It looks like that, early on, we could be in the business of doing experiments and test flights,” he said. There is particular interest, he said, in flying instruments to raise their technology readiness level for later spaceflight applications.

The main business of World View, though, remains flying people (they call their customers “Voyagers”) to high altitudes to experience views of the Earth not dissimilar to those from space. The World View press release said those flights are scheduled to begin in 2016, although MacCallum said Monday it’s likely to be very late in 2016 before commercial flights would begin. “We’ve sold our first few flights,” he said, adding he expected sales to increase as World View transitioned from a concept to actual flight hardware, as has been the case for suborbital vehicle developers. “We’re happy with the response we’re getting.”

MacCallum said those commercial flights will likely take place from several locations in the American Southwest, because of shifting winds. One location they’re particularly interested in is Page, a town in northern Arizona east of the Grand Canyon that is a popular location for balloonists. “When you talk to balloonists, they all swoon over Page,” he said, because of the weather conditions there as well as the views flights there offer. Other locations include Roswell as well as potential sites in California, Colorado, and Nevada; the company has a sales office in Las Vegas.

The same day that World View tested its balloon and parafoil system, the company achieved another milestone. Arizona Gov. Jan Brewer signed into law a spaceflight liability indemnification bill in a ceremony that day at the offices of of Paragon Space Development Corporation in Tucson. (Paragon formed World View to pursue the high-altitude balloon concept, and MacCallum is the CEO and CTO of Paragon as well.) The Arizona legislation is similar to that in several other states that protects spaceflight operators from liability in the event of the death or injury of spaceflight participants. “That sort of gives us a ‘Southwest Corridor’ to work in” for flights, he said, referring to similar laws in several neighboring states.

A new company featuring some familiar faces is planning to develop a high altitude balloon system that will carry passengers to the edge of space on multi-hour flights, but [...]]]>

Illustration of World View’s balloon in the upper atmosphere, with a capsule carrying up to eight people suspended under a parafoil. (credit: World View Enterprises)

A new company featuring some familiar faces is planning to develop a high altitude balloon system that will carry passengers to the edge of space on multi-hour flights, but be treated as a launch vehicle by federal regulators.

Tucson-based World View Enterprises is formally unveiling its plans today for developing a system that will transport eight people in a pressurized capsule up to an altitude of 30 kilometers (98,400 feet), where they will remain for up to several hours before descending to Earth under a parafoil. The company expects to begin these flights no earlier than 2016, charging $75,000 a ticket, considerably less than rocket-powered suborbital space tourism ventures like Virgin Galactic and XCOR Aerospace.

The announcement is tied to the expected publication today by the FAA of a determination that World View’s vehicle is considered a launch vehicle, and thus would be regulated by the FAA’s Office of Commercial Space Transportation (AST) and not the aviation side of the FAA. That determination means that World View flights would take place under a launch license, just like commercial suborbital and orbital rocket launches.

That determination is based on the FAA’s interpretation of the definition of a launch vehicle under federal law (specifically, 51 USC § 50902). The law defines a launch vehicle as being either “a vehicle built to operate in, or place a payload or human beings in, outer space” or “a suborbital rocket.” (The term “outer space” is not explicitly defined in federal law.) The second definition doesn’t apply to World View, since it is not a rocket, but FAA lawyers noted that the capsule will be designed to operate as if it was in orbit, and that humans could not survive in the environment at an altitude of 30 kilometers without the protection the capsule provided. “Regardless of whether 30 kilometers constitutes outer space—and the FAA renders no opinion on that question—a person would experience the same physiological responses at 30 kilometers as if exposed to the environment of low-Earth orbit (LEO),” the FAA letter states. Because of that, and also because the vehicle spends most of the time of each flight at that altitude, the FAA considers it a launch vehicle and thus will be licensed as such.

“This would not be possible without the spaceflight regulatory regime,” Taber MacCallum, chief technology officer of World View Enterprises, said in an interview on Monday. “On the aviation side, the regulations don’t fit.” Specifically, he said FAA regulations for balloons only cover those with wicker gondolas and require much higher levels of structural safety in the balloon than what’s feasible with World View’s design.

“Fundamentally, the capsule is a spacecraft, and it will be qualified like a spacecraft,” said Jane Poynter, the CEO of World View.

Poynter and MacCallum are familiar faces in the space industry, co-founders of Paragon Space Development Corporation, a company that specializes in life support systems; Poynter is president and chairwoman of the company and MacCallum is CEO and CTO. MacCallum is also CTO of the Inspiration Mars Foundation, the project announced earlier this year to design a crewed Mars flyby mission for launch in 2018. A third co-founder of Paragon, chief engineer Grant Anderson, will also be supporting World View, while Alan Stern, a former NASA associate administrator who is involved with multiple commercial ventures, including Golden Spike, will be World View’s chief scientist.

A closeup of the World View capsule. (credit: World View Enterprises)

World View in funded for its current development phase, Poynter said, from sources like the VegasTech Fund and others involved in resorts. “We didn’t feel the need to go to the space or aerospace technology world for funding,” she said. “The luxury experience world is where a lot of our funding came from.”

The company is marketing the balloon flights on the experience of seeing the Earth from (near) space, offering views for far longer than possible on suborbital rocket-powered flights. “We want to be able give people access to the experience of seeing the Earth from space,” Poynter said, perhaps giving passengers the experience of the “Overview Effect” that many astronauts have experienced on orbital flights. MacCallum noted that James May, one of the stars of the British show Top Gear, found a high-altitude flight on a U-2 aircraft to be a particularly transformative experience, giving them confidence that the even higher and longer World View flights can have a similar effect on passengers.

The company doesn’t see itself in competition with Virgin, XCOR, or others planning rocket-powered suborbital flights that will go to altitudes of 100 kilometers or more and offer several minutes of weightlessness. In fact, Poynter and MacCallum believe the balloon flights may encourage people to then go on suborbital rocket flights. “I really think we’ll end up being a feeder, helping the other suborbital folks,” MacCallum said.

A company they will be in much closer competition with is Spanish company zero2infinity, which is planning similar high-altitude passenger balloon flights under the “bloon” name. That company is proposing slightly higher flights (to 36 kilometers) in a pressurized capsule that can carry four passengers and two pilots. (World View is initially planning to carry six passengers and two pilots, later going to seven passengers and one pilot.) Neither Poynter nor MacCallum said they knew enough about zero2infinity to comment on how they were different, but noted the presence of two companies offering similar experiences helped validate the market in the eyes of their investors.

For now, World View is working on smaller scale tests of the complete flight profile through early next year, after which they’ll move on to development of the full-scale system and tests that they expect will take two years. Commercial operations would begin in 2016 at the earliest, a schedule MacCallum acknowledged required everything in the development process to go smoothly. While the FAA determination specified Spaceport America in New Mexico as the launch site of the flights, the company is looking at multiple locations, perhaps rotating the system though several on a seasonal basis.

“I’m personally very excited about this,” said Poynter, who noted she would be cutting back on her responsibilities at Paragon to focus on World View. “We’re really bringing something new into this incredibly exciting time in commercial spaceflight.”