Want to travel to space?

Nearly half of Americans want to travel to space. But that means the other half doesn’t, according to a 2021 survey by ValuePenguin, one of LendingTree’s financial research websites. Nearly 40% said space travel was too dangerous, while others worried about environmental impact and costs.

Soon there will be an option that addresses those worries, according to companies that plan to send passengers into “space” via high-altitude balloons.

In reality, the balloons rise less than half the distance to the technical definition of space, but that’s still nearly three times higher than most commercial flights travel — and high enough to see the Earth’s curvature.

Rather than a bone-rattling rocket launch, balloons are “very gentle,” said Jane Poynter, co-CEO at Space Perspective, which hopes to take passengers to the stratosphere in 2024.

There are no face-contorting “high Gs,” training isn’t required and trips don’t release carbon emissions either, she said.

The Florida-based company is using hydrogen to power its six-hour journeys, which Poynter said are going to be so smooth that passengers can eat, drink and walk around during the flight.  

Hydrogen is being hailed as the “fuel of the future” — a potential game-changing energy source that could alter the world’s reliance on fossil fuels.

But after a series of conversations with people in the field, CNBC Travel found a lack of consensus on its safety. Stratospheric balloons aren’t new — they’ve been used for scientific and weather research since the early 20th century.

But transporting groups of paying passengers in them is. 

Poynter was part of the team that helped former Google executive Alan Eustace break the world freefall record when he jumped from a stratospheric balloon nearly 26 miles above Earth.

While Eustace hung under a balloon wearing a spacesuit, Space Perspective’s passengers will travel via a pressurized capsule, which can fit eight travelers and a pilot, she said. The capsule is backed up by a parachute system that has been flown thousands of times without fail, she said.

“In all of the conversations that we have with people, safety is the first thing that comes up,” Poynter said during a video call from Florida’s Kennedy Space Center. “This is truly the safe way of going to space.”

In December 2017, a hydrogen-filled balloon exploded at the Tucson, Arizona, facilities of a stratospheric balloon company called World View Enterprises.

At the time, Poynter was World View’s CEO. She and her business partner and husband Taber MacCallum co-founded World View in 2012. They exited the company in 2019 and formed Space Perspective the same year.

A report by the Arizona Division of Occupational Safety and Health, obtained by CNBC under the Freedom of Information Act, stated that an on-site manager suspected “static electricity” ignited the hydrogen. According to the report, the accident occurred during a ground test, while the balloon was being deflated, and did not cause serious injuries.

An electrostatic discharge, i.e. a spark of static electricity, that ignited flammable hydrogen gas is widely believed to have caused the Hindenburg airship disaster in 1937.

But Peter Washabaugh, an associate professor of aerospace engineering at the University of Michigan, said hydrogen was inappropriately blamed for the Hindenburg crash.

“The outer covering of the vehicle was flammable. It is not clear what caught fire first — the covering or the hydrogen,” he said. “The craft was being operated aggressively during a storm… I would say it was operational negligence.”

Washabaugh said technological advances have made using hydrogen safer.

“Lots has changed in the last 100 years,” he said, noting that newer balloon materials “are specifically better at containing hydrogen.”

Robert Knotts, a former engineering officer with the U.K.’s Royal Air Force and current council member of England’s Airship Association, agreed.

cnbc.com