Richard Branson is investing in a plane that'll take tourists to the edge of space,
but who needs that when you've got balloons? A company in Arizona is
working on a high-altitude craft that'll use a huge balloon to gently
carry passengers voyagers to the edges of the atmosphere.
It's
already tested the technology with a 10-percent size scale model, which
carried and safely returned a payload of 200 kilos. The next step is to
build a full-sized equivalent, capable of journeying 120,000 feet into
the air and back again just short of the 127,852 feet that Felix Baumgartner
fell during the Red Bull Stratos experiment / publicity stunt.
Of
course, anything that involves a trip to space (or as close as anyone
can say) is going to be expensive, and it'll set you back $75,000 if you
choose to get in line when commercial trips begin in 2016.
Saturday, June 28, 2014
Balloons could power space tourism by 2016
1:39 AM
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