Someday soon, it might well be possible to buy a ticket to the Earth's upper atmosphere. The space tourism industry is set to take off: Virgin Galactic’s SpaceShipOne launches next year, and Elon Musk’s SpaceX program is ramping up funding. World View, a lesser known effort, is another potential ticket to the heavens. It's an audacious bid to take travelers on five-hour tours to near space, all inside a luxury flight capsule hoisted by a giant balloon.

World View was born out of Paragon Space Development Corporation, an Arizona-based company that specializes in life support infrastructure for extreme environments. In terms of transportation design, space tourism is a new frontier, so when Paragon approached British studio Priestmangoode about designing the capsule, the firm essentially had carte blanche. And Priestmangoode knows luxury travel: it's outfitted Thai Airways, Malaysia Airways, and Virgin with new first class cabins, and created concepts for a high speed rail.

The challenges involved in space tourism are myriad. It's an industry famous for overpromising. Like its competitors, Paragon still has a raft of thorny issues to sort out: things like permits and launch sites, not to mention the technical aspects of building a feasible, safe balloon that can, you know, float up to space.

But the endeavor also demands new thinking about the experience itself. After all, luxury travel is typically about getting people from point A to point B as quickly and as comfortably as possible. According to Nigel Goode, director of Priestmangoode, that's not necessarily true when your destination is near space.

“You’re going 100,000 feet above the earth’s surface,” he says. “You’re seeing the curvature of earth, the blackness of space. It’s such a life-changing experience. This is what it’s all about.” In other words, it's a thing to be savored.

As Goode sees it, the World View trips would begin before dusk. The large balloon that powers the capsule might need about an hour and half to get to 100,000 feet; after that, World View could drift into orbit for a few hours. The view that would afford is its own special kind of luxury, so Goode and his team designed the pod around four circular windows, each of which would allow two of the six passengers (and the two crew members) a front row seat.

Plans for the interiors are still in the idea phase, but Goode says they’ll also be designed with luxury top of the mind. Like aircraft interiors, World View’s seats need to be as lightweight as possible—even a few pounds can add up to thousands in fuel costs—so carbon fiber and ultra thin leather padding are materials candidates.

The similarities might stop there: With air travel, designers are trying to make passengers forget that they’re in a metal tube. With World View, Goode doesn’t want them to forget it. “It’s got to look as though you’re traveling to space,” he says. “Every element is so the passenger feels like one of the chosen few, sitting in an environment that won’t be familiar for them.” (That said, they’d like to dispel of any cheesy futurism: “Obviously if you ask people what they expect it to be, it’s like something from 2001: A Space Odyssey,” Goode says.) There will be a bar, a snack area, and a bathroom. Pairs of seats will face the four windows, but six will need to swivel: Goode wants everyone to face the direction of travel during take off and landing.

As much as Goode wants to create the right design language for a new kind of luxury, he also needs to design for repetition: Paragon hopes to launch several World Views, each available for both tourism and professional research. But there's the space tourism industry getting ahead of itself again. Sure, they might have settled on an idea of what near space travel should feel like, in terms of the seats and sight lines. The real challenge, as ever, is making it a reality.