Space Tourism via Balloon Spaceflight
World View Breaks World Record with Successful Test Flight [With Video], World View
“Representing a milestone accomplishment, World View, the commercial balloon spaceflight company, has successfully completed a scaled test flight of its high-altitude balloon spaceflight system breaking the world record for highest parafoil flight in the process.”
From the looks of that pod, it appears they plan to cater to Star Wars fans.
I have a competing idea from my hopelessly warped mind,
it involves the SpaceX grasshopper,
recovers some R&D expense from the reusable lunch program,
Its a commercial base jump with wing suits from a number of seats on the top of Grasshopper!yes you heard that right and you heard it here.
How many seats can fit in a circle around the top of the grasshopper?
http://yellowdragonblog.com…
this idea should have the balloon folks running scared
that idea should have everyone running scared.
there’s no way to make something like that anything close to approaching what anyone would call “safe.”
i think an open air platform might kill anyone sitting on top of it… even with a quick “hop” to 10,000 feet (about 1.9 miles) a rocket gets going several hundred miles per hour. there’s a lot of forces and stresses involved that you’d have to be securely strapped into a chair to handle.
even if you did survive up to main engine cutoff, then there’s the major hazard of the rocket stage drifting in the air where the people also are. everything is free-falling and uncontrolled, someone will smash into the rocket, or the rocket will smash into them.
Hug Doug,
thanks for your reply
I think the Grasshopper is capable of a much slower ascent then what you propose
we could use a canopy above the customers
grasshopper does not have a main engine cut toff
it needs to hover at 10,000 feet while the customers deploy
My blog does state wing suit jumpers why?
they have a glide ratio in the horizontal away from grasshopper so this I think might be enough to avoid the nozzle
wing suit jumpers would be torn between two products, based on price and experience,the wimpy balloon crowd and high price or the exciting , I jumped off a rocket crowd.
wing suits might be a way to escape some vehicles
a slow ascent is not very efficient. you will be burning a lot more fuel to fly. that will drive up the cost of this ride even more.
hovering is even MORE dangerous, because now you are having people jumping past the rocket’s flame. wingsuits do not produce a glide effect until you’ve built up speed. when the jump is from an airplane, the horizontal speed of the aircraft allows wingsuits to glide immediately. but here you are calling for a stationary jump point – the rocket is hovering, so the initial jump is essentially straight down, right past the rocket exhaust. also, any wind shear could still easily push a person into the rocket’s body or into the exhaust flames. yay for paying customers burnt to a crisp.
106 feet for the original grasshopper the current grasshopper is a falcon 9 first stage,
so your point about building up speed before glide to lift ratios kick in is well taken, so I must find out what that time to horizontal lift might be for a wing suit jumper,
a person at Velocity at 60 feet (18 meters) per second (40 miles [64 km] per hour)
http://injuryprevention.bmj…
http://prezi.com/nwd0lyftve…
I have posted a solution to your criticism and credited NASA watch and you for leading me to this solution!
oh, egress poles. hmm. you know, that might actually work. clever.
i still doubt this idea would ever fly, but for a back-of-the-napkin sketch, it is interesting.
still, you never know. Elon Musk does like to do super risky things :p
Plus… if you hit a bug…