Balloon company plans to carry tourists on a long, luxurious trip to the edge of space

Mercedes this morning let us know it's teaming up with a company called Space Perspective, which will offer paying passengers a first-class ticket to space via a balloon.

Well, not space. The vehicle they'd fly is trademark-dubbed the SpaceBalloon, but the targeted altitude is 100,000 feet. That's well shy of the 50-mile (264,000 feet) boundary for space recognized by NASA, and even shier of the internationally recognized Kármán Line at 100 kilometers (328,000 feet). Though because the atmosphere simply gets thinner the higher you go, there's no real hard boundary to space, so calling it space is fair game. Air Force legend Col. Joe Kittinger called it a "space environment." More on him in a moment.

Whatever you call it, that's damned high — 100,000 feet is a serious altitude, three times higher than the airlines fly. From there, passengers will see the curvature of the planet and the blackness of space. And Space Perspective promises they'll see all this from a gondola — the company calls the pressurized capsule Spaceship Neptune — featuring the biggest windows ever provided for space tourists. From the renders at the company's website, they look massive: Each is 22 inches wide by 60 inches tall.

Best of all, the spacefarers will be taking part in a six-hour journey: two hours each for ascent and descent, and two hours at altitude. Other space tourism operations featuring suborbital flights are at peak altitude for mere moments. Unlike those flights, the balloon customers won't experience weightlessness as they won't be in freefall. 

The interior, aka the Space Lounge, will have nine reclining couches, for eight passengers and one pilot.

More advantages: They'll get a first-class in-flight meal, cocktails and access to a lavatory. (Not sure if that's a closed system or whether passenger output is expected to burn up on reentry.)

What's Mercedes' role in all this? It's going to provide Mercedes-Maybach electric vehicles to transport Space Perspective's trademark-capital-E Explorers to the launch site. The presence of Maybachs hints at the clientele they're going for — tickets for a flight will cost $125,000. It sounds like Maybach will also contribute to the capsule interior design.

For some perspective on what 100,000 feet is like: In 1960, Air Force Capt. (later Col.) Joe Kittinger rode a balloon to 102,800 feet — and then parachuted from it. He was in a freefall dive for 4 minutes and 36 seconds, went into a spin and blacked out before his drogue parachute deployed at 18,000 feet. His records for highest jump and fastest speed achieved by a human without an aircraft (614 mph) went unbroken for 52 years.

Here's Kittinger talking about the jump, and footage of the jump itself. Fascinating guy, a real American Hero. He died in 2022 at age 94.

Then in 2012, Red Bull's Felix Baumgartner rose to 127,852 feet, parachuted, and became the first human to break the sound barrier with his body, hitting 843.6 mph. He opened his chute at 8,400 feet. Joe Kittinger was on the mike in Mission Control.

Two years later, Alan Eustace, a retired SVP of engineering at Google, broke Baumgartner's record, flying to 138,889 feet before jumping, an altitude record that still stands.

In videos of these jumps, you get a sense of what 100,000 feet will look like for Space Perspective's customers.