Balloon company plans to carry tourists on a long, first-class 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. 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. Though unlike those flights, the balloon customers won't experience weightlessness as they won't be in freefall.

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.