Tucson-based startup World View has announced the latest tech to join the commercial space race: a football-field-size helium balloon designed to take paying customers 18 miles (98,000 feet) in the air.

Okay, so 98,000 feet is near space, technically. Nonetheless, it's high enough to recognize the outline of the U.S. and for the sky to be black above you. And when World View begins flying, three years from now, it could be the ideal way to get your suborbital fix.

First, passengers will get considerably more gawking time for their money. Companies such as Virgin Galactic are jockeying to send wealthy passengers to suborbital space aboard space planes. But Virgin's $250,000 rocket-powered experience will hurtle passengers at three times the speed of sound for a total flight time of 1.25 hours—in their words "pinning you back to your seat." World View's climb alone is estimated to last a leisurely 1.5 hours, with a full two hours of hover time to hang out and sip cocktails up where the stars are always shining, before a somewhat speedier descent of 20 to 40 minutes. Total flying time: approximately 5 hours. Price tag: $75,000.

Second, World View offers a certain type of convenience, relatively speaking, to whoever can shell out the cash. A spin in Virgin Galactic's SpaceShipTwo requires two days of training and prep, but a World View balloon ride will necessitate a mere briefing before liftoff. So while World View can't offer what many consider the quintessential space experience‚ weightlessness‚ boarding the craft won't be that different from getting on an airplane.

World View is brought to you by husband-and-wife team Jayne Poynter and Taber MacCallum, World View Enterprise's CEO and CTO, respectively. Both are veterans of Biosphere 2 and have worked on life-support technology for NASA projects. The World View capsule will be suspended beneath a parasail, all of which dangles beneath a 20-microns-thick polyethylene balloon holding 14 million cubic feet of gas.

In a statement released Oct. 21, World View states that travelers "... will be among the few to have seen the curvature of the Earth with their own eyes." This isn't exactly true—the curvature of the earth is visible from passenger planes, though one needs an unobstructed 60 degrees of visibility to see it, which isn't available to most with a window seat. No one could argue the view won't be highly impressive. For a hint at what Earth from this height might actually look like, eschew World View's slick animated simulation for amateur high-altitude-balloonist Alexei Karpenko's low-tech yet breathtaking images achieved via a sort of World View mini-me: a weather balloon carrying a 3-megapixel Canon PowerShot.

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