Brooklyn’s budding aerospace industry is counting on the private space-travel sector to take off in the next few years. The spacesuit manufacturers at the Navy Yard’s Final Frontier Designs have designed what they say is a prime product, but they can’t produce them en masse without a contract from a deep-pocketed rocket-ride provider. The National Aeronautics and Space Administration has been using the same vendor since its inception in the 1950s, so Brooklyn’s starry-eyed inventors are dependent on at least some of these star-ship endeavors to succeed.
• The brainchild of Virgin Airlines head Richard Branson, Virgin Galactic started working on a space program back in 1999. The company hopes to bring passengers into suborbital altitudes which would reach the very edge of what is called “space” at about 62 miles up. Would-be zero-gravity tourists have been putting down deposits of as much as $250,000 since 2005, but Virgin’s first commercial flight has been pushed back a number of times because of technical issues. And so far, unfortunately for Brooklyn’s space program, passengers are set to fly sans suit as they won’t be busting all the way out of the atmosphere.
• SpaceX is really shooting for the stars. The company started building rockets back in 2002 and has successfully flown a cargo-delivery mission to the International Space Station, which orbits the earth at an altitude of around 200 miles. The company seems to be focusing on government work for now, but its ultimate goal is enabling human settlement on other planets.
• Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon.com, is another tycoon with out-of-this-world ambitions. His company Blue Origin is currently working on a rocket design and focusing on suborbital flights, mostly for researchers. But Bezos hopes to eventually send private citizens all the way to space.
• Aeronautical mainstay Boeing is also working on a spaceship, and just won a federal contract to build a new astronaut-carrying spacecraft. The CST-100 is set to start carrying crews to the International Space Station in 2017 and could carry civilians for short stays at the station, too. No word on how much that would cost.
• Another potential market for Fort Greene’s resident spacesuit makers is high-altitude balloons. Red Bull famously designed a balloon and spacesuit to bring daredevil Felix Baumgartner to a height of 150,000 feet for a record-breaking parachute jump.
Final Frontier currently counts Zero2Infiniti as a client. The Spanish company wants to send passengers 22 miles up in a glass-lined pod that would provide awesome views for $140,000 a trip. Flights at that height will not require a spacesuit, but the company is testing the suits to see if its balloons can go even higher.
