Jane Poynter is an American aerospace executive, author and speaker. She is founder, co-CEO and CXO of Space Perspective, a luxury space travel company. She was co-founder and former CEO of World View Enterprises, a private near-space exploration and technology company headquartered in Tucson, Arizona. Poynter was also a founding member of the Biosphere 2 design team and a crew member from the original two-year mission inside the materially closed ecological system.
Prior to World View, Poynter served as co-founder, Chairwoman and President of Paragon Space Development Corporation, a designer and manufacturer of hazardous environment life support equipment.
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Space Perspective is a high-altitude flight tourism company, founded and incorporated in 2019 by Poynter and Taber MacCallum, with plans to launch its nine-person Spaceship Neptune crewed balloon from NASA Kennedy Space Center. [1]
On June 18, 2020, Space Perspective announced plans to balloon passengers to nearly 100,000 feet (30,000 m; 30 km) above the Earth. The tickets are US$125,000 per seat. [2] [3]
On 2 December 2020, Space Perspective closed its seed funding round. US$7 million of funding had been gathered. The company planned the first uncrewed test flight in the first half of 2021 and crewed operational flights by end of 2024. [4]
World View Enterprises, doing business as World View, is a private American near-space exploration and technology company headquartered in Tucson, Arizona, founded with the goal of increasing access to and the utilization of the stratosphere for scientific, commercial, and economic purposes.[ citation needed ]
World View was founded and incorporated in 2012 by a team of aerospace and life support veterans, including Biosphere 2 crew-members Poynter and Taber MacCallum, Alan Stern (the principal investigator of the New Horizons mission to Pluto), and former NASA astronaut Mark Kelly. The company designs, manufactures and operates stratospheric flight technology for a variety of customers and applications.[ citation needed ]
The Stratollite [5] is a remotely operated, navigable, un-crewed stratospheric flight vehicle designed and engineered to station-keep over customer-specified areas of interest for long periods of time (days, weeks, and months). The Stratollite uses proprietary altitude control technology to rise and lower in the stratosphere, harnessing the natural currents of varying stratospheric winds to provide point-to-point navigation and loitering. The Stratollite operates at altitudes up to 95,000 ft. (30 km) with a payload capacity of 50 kg and 250W of continuous power to payloads. The Stratollite is primarily used for applications including remote sensing, communications, and weather. [6]
Poynter was a founder of Paragon Space Development Corporation, which develops technologies for extreme environments (like outer space and under water). While inside Biosphere 2, she co-founded the firm with fellow biospherian, Taber MacCallum, whom she later married, [7] Grant Anderson, Paragon's President and CEO and several other aerospace engineers. In 2009 the National Association for Female Executives awarded Poynter its Entrepreneur of the Year award. [8]
Poynter was a developer of the crew and life-support systems [9] for the Inspiration Mars free-return mission to Mars planned for launch in January 2018. The two person spaceflight mission was originally to be a private, nonprofit venture [10] of 501 days duration which will allow a small human-carrying spacecraft to use the smallest possible amount of fuel to get it to Mars and back to Earth. [11] However, this plan proved unworkable without significant funding and assistance from NASA. [12]
The life support system is critical:
"If anything goes wrong, the spacecraft should make its own way back to Earth — but with no possibility of any short-cuts home." [13]
Poynter was one of eight people who agreed to live in a sealed artificial world for two years from September 1991 to September 1993. Just twelve days into the mission, she was injured in a rice-threshing machine, and had to leave the Biosphere for medical treatment. [14] She was out for less than seven hours. The project came under media criticism after it was revealed that some spare parts were placed in the airlock with her when she went back in.
Poynter reported that low morale and psychological problems plagued the two-year mission. [15] The eight crew members eventually split into two factions of four who hated each other.
Poynter also worked with the World Bank on projects to mitigate global climate change and grow crops in drought-stricken Africa and Central America. She is president of Blue Marble Institute, a 501(c)(3) non profit dedicated to leadership in science, sustainability and exploration. She serves on the City of Tucson's Climate Change Committee. [16] Her second book, Champions for Change: Athletes Making A World of Difference is now a middle school program. [17]
Poynter has been an invited speaker at events hosted by groups such as the United Nations Environment Programme, the US Environmental Protection Agency, TEDx, National Space Symposium, NASA, MIT, and Microsoft.
An aerobot is an aerial robot, usually used in the context of an unmanned space probe or unmanned aerial vehicle.
Space tourism is human space travel for recreational purposes. There are several different types of space tourism, including orbital, suborbital and lunar space tourism.
Biosphere 2 is an American Earth system science research facility located in Oracle, Arizona. Its mission is to serve as a center for research, outreach, teaching, and lifelong learning about Earth, its living systems, and its place in the universe. It is a 3.14-acre (1.27-hectare) structure originally built to be an artificial, materially closed ecological system, or vivarium. It remains the largest closed ecological system ever created.
Private spaceflight refers to spaceflight developments that are not conducted by a government agency, such as NASA or ESA.
A life-support system is the combination of equipment that allows survival in an environment or situation that would not support that life in its absence. It is generally applied to systems supporting human life in situations where the outside environment is hostile, such as outer space or underwater, or medical situations where the health of the person is compromised to the extent that the risk of death would be high without the function of the equipment.
High-altitude balloons or stratostats are usually uncrewed balloons typically filled with helium or hydrogen and released into the stratosphere, generally attaining between 18 and 37 km above sea level. In 2013, a balloon named BS 13-08 reached a record altitude of 53.7 km.
Romanian Cosmonautics and Aeronautics Association, also known as ARCAspace, is an aerospace company based in Râmnicu Vâlcea, Romania. It builds rockets, high-altitude balloons, and unmanned aerial vehicles. It was founded in 1999 as a non-governmental organization in Romania by the Romanian engineer and entrepreneur Dumitru Popescu and other rocket and aeronautics enthusiasts. Since then, ARCA has launched two stratospheric rockets and four large-scale stratospheric balloons including a cluster balloon. It was awarded two governmental contracts with the Romanian government and one contract with the European Space Agency. ARCASpace is currently developing a three-stage, semi-reusable steam-powered rocket called EcoRocket and in 2022 has shifted its business model to Asteroid mining.
Dragon is the name of a family of spacecraft developed and produced by American private space transportation company SpaceX. The first family member, now referred to as Dragon 1, flew 23 cargo missions to the ISS between 2010 and 2020 before retiring. With this first version not designed for carrying astronauts, it was funded by NASA with $396 million awarded through the Commercial Orbital Transportation Services (COTS) program, with SpaceX being announced as a winner of the first round of funding on August 18, 2006.
Taber MacCallum is the co-founder and co-CEO of Space Perspective, a human spaceflight company planning to take people and payloads to the edge of space by balloon, and the former Chairman of the Commercial Spaceflight Federation (CSF). He is co-founder and former CTO of World View Enterprises, a stratospheric balloon company using its un-crewed Stratollite for remote communications and sensing. MacCallum was also a founding member of the Biosphere 2 design team and a crew member from the original two-year mission inside the materially-closed ecological system.
Paragon Space Development Corporation is an American company headquartered in Tucson, Arizona. Paragon is a provider of environmental controls for extreme and hazardous environments. They design, build, test and operate life-support systems and leading thermal-control products for astronauts, contaminated water divers, and other extreme environment explorers, as well as for uncrewed space and terrestrial applications.
The idea of sending humans to Mars has been the subject of aerospace engineering and scientific studies since the late 1940s as part of the broader exploration of Mars. Long-term proposals have included sending settlers and terraforming the planet. Proposals for human missions to Mars have come from agencies such as NASA, CNSA, the European Space Agency, Boeing, and SpaceX. Currently, only robotic landers and rovers have been on Mars. The farthest humans have been beyond Earth is the Moon, under the Apollo program.
The Review of United States Human Space Flight Plans Committee, better known as the HSF Committee, Augustine Commission, or Augustine Committee, was a group convened by NASA at the request of the Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP), to review the nation's human spaceflight plans to ensure "a vigorous and sustainable path to achieving its boldest aspirations in space." The review was announced by the OSTP on May 7, 2009. It covered human spaceflight options after the time NASA had planned to retire the Space Shuttle. A summary report was provided to the OSTP Director John Holdren, White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP), and NASA Administrator on September 8, 2009. The estimated cost associated with the review was expected to be US$3 million. The committee was scheduled to be active for 180 days; the report was released on October 22, 2009.
A Mars aircraft is a vehicle capable of sustaining powered flight in the atmosphere of Mars. So far, the Mars helicopter Ingenuity is the only aircraft ever to fly on Mars, completing 67 successful flights covering 15.499 km (9.631 mi) in 2 hour, 1 minutes and 4 seconds of flight time.
Inspiration Mars Foundation was an American nonprofit organization founded by Dennis Tito that in 2013 proposed to launch a crewed mission to flyby Mars in January 2018, or 2021 if they missed the first synodic opportunity in 2018.
World View Enterprises, Inc., doing business as World View, is a private American near space exploration and technology company headquartered in Tucson, Arizona, founded with the goal of increasing access to and the utilization of the stratosphere for scientific, commercial, economic, and military purposes.
Robert Alan Eustace is an American computer scientist who served as Senior Vice President of Engineering and first Senior Vice President for Knowledge at Google until retiring in 2015. On October 24, 2014, he made a free-fall jump from the Stratosphere, breaking Felix Baumgartner's world record. The jump was from 135,890 feet (41.42 km) and lasted 15 minutes, an altitude record that stands as of 2023.
Jim Cantrell is an American entrepreneur, mechanical engineer and road racer. He is the CEO and co-founder of Phantom Space Corporation, which aims to build space transportation technology. After working at the French Space Agency CNES and the NASA Jet Propulsion Lab, he worked as an independent consultant to aerospace companies for fifteen years and was on the founding teams of SpaceX and Moon Express. Cantrell was SpaceX's first vice president of business development and Elon Musk's industry mentor when SpaceX launched in 2002.
The future of space exploration involves both telescopic exploration and the physical exploration of space by robotic spacecraft and human spaceflight.
The GUSTO mission is a high-altitude balloon mission that carry an infrared telescope to measure fine-structure line emission from the interstellar medium. The mission was developed by NASA's Explorers Program, and was launched in December 2023 from Antarctica.
Deimos-One is an American spaceflight technology development company working on an AI powered, autonomous UAV rocket system to move payloads to space. As of January 2021, the company has completed a successful prototype test flight, reaching an altitude of 30 km (19 mi).