World View, the commercial balloon spaceflight company, has updated its pricing policy to allow payloads of any size to share space on World View flights, ranging in mass from less than a pound to more than a few hundred pounds. This will lower cost of flight options for a wide range of customers, drastically increasing access to near-space for scientists and researchers around the world.
Normally, customers have to raise hundreds of thousands of dollars for the cost of a full flight to send a payload into the stratosphere. With this cost-sharing, fractional pricing model, World View has reduced the barrier of entry to as low as $20,000 per experiment. Imagine the implications of increased, low-cost access to the stratosphere; Students, scientists, teachers, and independent researchers around the world will now have increased opportunities to send their incredible, imaginative, and potentially groundbreaking experiments to altitudes of up to 130,000 feet, or the very edge of space.
World View’s high-altitude balloon flight platform provides a variety of advantages for research and education as compared to rocket-based flight, including earlier access in many cases, better cost affordability, longer duration flight, lower Gs and vibration, increased range of flight, and lower ascent and descent speeds for a gentler overall ride. These advantages provide the ideal flight platform for many small, delicate, and lower-budget experiments.
Alan Stern, World View’s Chief Scientist and New Horizons mission leader, spearheaded the effort to introduce fractional payload pricing to the World View product line. For him, this represented an opportunity to usher in a new era of increased and affordable exploration of near-space. “Until now, access to the stratosphere has been incredibly rare and very expensive. That’s what makes World View’s fractional payload pricing model a game-changer. We plan to take what was rare and make it routine and affordable,” said Alan Stern.
Check out a new, short video about World View’s payload flight capabilities at this link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KqgiYb6w1mY
You can contact a World View representative for flight availability via the website or by emailing flight@worldviewexperience.com
About World View
Offering a gentle, comfortable, and life changing travel experience to the edge of space for private citizens and affordable access to a range of near-space commercialization opportunities for researchers, private companies, and government agencies, World View is pioneering a new era of discovery at the edge of space. Available today for unmanned commercial opportunities with an altitude threshold of 130,000ft, and currently taking reservations for manned flights and private tours, World View is creating unprecedented access to the near-space environment. Watch the World View experience here. For more information, visit http://www.worldviewexperience.com. Follow us on Facebook and Twitter for real-time updates.
