There’s a Mercedes floating in space like there’s a Tesla, but soon space travelers will be able to escape Earth’s atmosphere Maybach-style. Thanks to a new partnership with Space Perspective, Mercedes-Maybach is overcoming the barriers of its logo more than ever. .
Space Perspective is the world’s first carbon-neutral spaceflight experience in company. It reinvented travel, aiming to take thousands of paying customers, called Space Perspective Explorers, 100,000 feet above the ground inside a pressurized capsule, called Spaceship Neptune, attached to a giant balloon called SpaceBalloon.
It is in the capsule that the Maybach experiment is intended to take place. This is where 8 explorers and a captain can enjoy a flight around the area in luxury. The chairs are designed to look more like recliners than airplane seats. There is a meal and cocktail service.
The Neptune spacecraft also houses a “view bath,” arguably the most common bathroom ever designed for the population of the Sun’s Third Rock. Wi-Fi will be available during the flight.
The journey into space in the pressurized Neptune capsule should be as smooth for passengers as the takeoff and landing of a hot air balloon, despite a much higher adventure and under more adverse circumstances. Each is expected to last six hours from takeoff to landing and provides 450 miles of visibility in all directions through giant windows.
Jane Poynter, founder and co-executive director of Space Perspective and a scientist at Biosphere 2, told Newsweek that the company’s origins stem from the time it was locked up at Biosphere 2, an autonomous experimental studies facility in Oracle, Arizona, for two years starting in 1991. . a 1993.
“It’s more airtight than the International Space Station of the time. The concept is that planet Earth is Biosphere 1. So it’s a miniaturized edition of planet Earth, very simplified, of course, but it had its own little rainforest, a savannah and an ocean. , a swamp and the position where we lived and where we grew our own food.
“And the amazing thing about this private experience was living inside this formula where all the plants gave us oxygen to breathe. And as I exhaled, I knew that CO2 was going to make the food we ate. . . “And I can see the boundaries of my world, the arrangement of glass and seal of the biosphere. And I knew, on a very deep visceral level, that everything we had inside our biosphere during those two years was all we had. And of course, by extension, it is just like planet Earth.
“And it turns out it’s precisely the same kind of visceral delight that astronauts have. When you see our world, our planet from space, you see this thin blue line, this bright, curved blue line of our atmosphere, which, like astronaut Nicole Stott, is the only border that matters, because it separates us from the general darkness of space. And it’s a deeply moving experience for astronauts as they go into space.
“[At Spaceship Neptune] there’s no spacesuit, none of that and we use a balloon that gently takes other people into space to have that quintessential astronaut experience. “
The rovers will travel to and from the capsule in Mercedes-Maybach electric vehicles. “Our partnership with Space Perspective will allow space explorers to travel with pleasure on the surface and allow us to extend the highest point of refinement and delight of the Maybach logo to the far reaches of the area,” Daniel Lescow, Head of Mercedes-Maybach at Mercedes-Benz Group AG, said in a press release.
“Combining our all-electric Neptune spacecraft with the all-electric Mercedes-Maybach represents a sustainable and inspiring future, not to mention an overall greater experience for space explorers. “
Space Perspective aims to be a greener mode of transportation than classic spaceflight, which requires burning thousands of tons of fossil fuels to propel itself into the atmosphere.
To date, more than 1,650 explorers have booked $125,000 worth of the Space Perspective experience per year. Space tourism flights are expected to begin in late 2024.
Prior to liftoff, passengers meet with the Space Perspective team at Kennedy Space Center, where they will receive a tour of the company’s facilities and a safety briefing. Passengers can electronically book a behind-the-scenes tour from the Space Center to the site before liftoff.
The release is made from land or sea and is followed by an ascent of 19 km/h before the craft reaches an altitude of 100,000 feet, three times the height at which an airplane flies. After a few hours at this height, tourists descend. back to Earth before crashing into the ocean.