World View's Balloon-Based Space Tourism to Lift Off in 2017

Arizona-based World View Enterprises aims to start launching paying customers to the stratosphere in 2017 beneath a giant balloon, for $75,000 per seat. Passengers will spend two hours at an altitude of 100,000 feet (30,500 meters), where they'll be able to see the blackness of space and the curvature of Earth, company representatives say. "I hear a lot of people say this: 'I don't want to have lived my entire life on this planet and never really seen it,'" World View chief technology