The CEO and founder of Space Perspective, Jane Poynter, talks to us about launching space travels very first luxury experience.

The commercial space race has been dominated by headlines from Bezos, Branson and Musk. Their rocket ships herald a new era in space flight and tourism for a select few. But hot on the heels of these high-profile space bros is another relatively more accessible offering that aims at an altogether gentler, more luxurious experience.

Imagine sipping on a martini, breathing deeply and looking over the blue layers that demarcate the edge of the atmosphere as the sun edges up slowly in the curved horizon. Youre dressed in your favourite cocktail club outfit and cast your eye, scanning the coastline below, a stars view of where land slowly meets the oceans on planet Earth. It might sound more like science fiction, but its closer to reality than you think.

Jane Poynter and Taber MacCallum, partners in business and life, have launched a unique experience onboard the ground-breaking, pressurised Spaceship Neptune, a luxury-cruise experience in the sky. Travellers in a piloted pod will ascend into the edge of space, some 100,000 feet high, using flight technology used for decades at NASA another of Poynter and MacCallums companies, Paragon Space Development Corporation, has supplied life-support system equipment to the agency for years and state-of-the-art space-balloon-engineering.

Space Perspectives trips will enable eight people, plus a pilot, in each Spaceship Neptune capsule to experience 360-degree, 725-kilometre views of space, the stars, sunrises and sunsets, as well as epic, breathtaking views of Earth below. The profound, six-hour, once-in-a-lifetime journey can be shared with friends and family, and even be the setting for special events, such as small weddings or concerts.

This summer, for the first time ever, your ticket to explore space with Poynters company is available to book online. Start saving.

Our entire careers have been devoted to looking at ways of taking people to space in a way thats more accessible, and rockets just didnt seem to be it yet. I mean, theres a lot of energy with a rocket, right? And its still a fairly nascent technology. And experientially, I think getting on a rocket is difficult for a lot of people to get their heads around and weve got high Gs and a lot of vibration and training. So we were looking for a way for people to have that astronaut experience in a much more comfortable, relaxed, gentle way.

When Taber was in his early teens, he saw his astrophysicist father send a large gamma-ray telescope under a space balloon to study our Milky Way he was actually on the team that discovered the black hole at the centre of the Milky Way galaxy. Taber remembered seeing these balloons going up and remembered the elegance and how gentle they were. He walked into my office one day and said, What do you think about taking people up under a space balloon? And that was it. Thats the idea. Thats exactly what we were looking for.

Its expensive and definitely for the wealthy, but I actually expected it to be more. Well, its less than half the price of Virgin Galactic actually it was half the price, as Virgin has gone from about US$250,000 to $425-450,000. So its quite likely youll see our price go up in the future, but we want this to be accessible to as many people as possible. The demand is such that well almost certainly be putting the price up before it comes down. Our long-term vision is for it to come down, but I think it would be a while before it does.

Its even smoother than being on a plane theres going to be a bar, therell be food. Theres no zero gravity or space suit, so you can lounge, and theres a bathroom. When youre in an aeroplane youre going through the air, so you sometimes get that buffeting. Were going up through the air, but were going so slowly, at 12mph [20km/h], that its incredibly smooth Its not the same mechanism as a hot-air balloon, but I suppose by analogy and experientially its similar. So, its not really like anything youve ever experienced before, but its very smooth.

We talked with a lot of astronauts about what the quintessential experience of being in space is. And you know what almost the universal response is? Its experiencing Earth from space. The zero-G part is cool, but it can also be kind of annoying. The rocket ride is like, OK but its really that experience of looking down at Earth, which youll be able to see.

It takes two hours to go up to space. And then youre really sitting on top of the atmosphere for about two hours, floating, and about two hours to come back down again. If you think about that, were in that last 1 percent of the atmosphere, and were 20 miles above the planet. And that last 1 percent extends for many, many, many miles beyond the International Space Station. So everything that you think of in low Earth orbit, thats all in that last 1 percent of the atmosphere.

So 80 percent of them at the moment are American and I think thats mostly because its where the majority of our press has been to date. And the rest is from all over the world. About 70 percent of those whove booked are men, which doesnt mean to say they arent going to take female companions with them. We also dont know exactly, for some of the flights, who the other customers are. About 45 percent of our flights have been booked as complete capsule flights between people. So sometimes well have somebody call and they say, Would you book two seats for me right now? But could you hold the rest of the capsule for a few days? Im just gonna go call some friends. And then a couple of days later, theyll call back and go, OK, I need the whole capsule.

I think that having more and more people go into space translates into a greater understanding of what the space industry at large brings to our everyday lives. Eventually with millions of people having that experience of seeing Earth in space, whether its from where were flying in suborbital flight, or from the moon or Mars, or from low Earth orbit in a space hotel one day, its going to have a huge ripple effect, because its the kind of experience that you dont un-experience, right? Once youve had that perspective change, you cant go back to the way you were before.

This article first appeared on Prestige Online Hong Kong.

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Out of This World: CEO and Founder of Space Perspective, Jane Poynter on Luxury Space Travel - Prestige Online