Colorado man plans to fly 19 miles above Earth in Arizona startup company’s first balloon voyage

Motivational speaker Doug Dvorak says he has long studied how we, as humans, use our life experiences to reach new levels of wisdom and understanding.

It’s an interest that the Edwards resident has channeled through an odd yet fitting combination of book writing and extreme sports, doing activities like hang gliding and sky diving while writing, among many other works, a foreword for a recent reprint of James Allen’s 1903 book, “As a Man Thinketh.“

The book explores man’s quest to open “the door of the temple of knowledge” by “utilizing his every experience.” With that book in mind, Dvorak, in his quest, is aiming to reach heights few will ever see, quite literally, as he plans to observe sunrise from the Earth’s stratosphere next year in a World View space balloon.

He has been nurturing the idea for some time, after following Felix Baumgartner’s world record 24-mile skydive from space, in which Baumgartner described the “overwhelming” sensation of seeing the curvature of the Earth before a totally black sky.

“I can’t think of any better experience to see one planet, one people, all interconnected,” Dvorak said.

He watched as technologies improved to the point where a startup company, World View, is now ready to take paying passengers to 100,000 feet in a pressurized capsule — complete with reclining seats and wraparound windows.

He was one of the first 200 people to sign up and went to Arizona, where the company is based, to take part in a space camp of sorts, designed to help World View passengers know what to look for when they’re 19 miles above Earth.

“They have all these really competent experts on flora, fauna, climate, population, and they just give you the straight, unvarnished, non-political, non-lobbiest view of what’s happening on our planet,” he said.

For a person driven by Allen’s belief that a human being can “find every truth connected with his being if he will dig deep into the mine of his soul,” the trip has particular appeal. He hopes to be on the company’s first voyage, departing from the Grand Canyon and returning to roughly that same area.

Dvorak said his wife and friends weren’t interested in joining him, especially in the aftermath of the Titan submersible implosion in 2023. And while that incident pushed back the goal line for space exploration companies like World View (Dvorak says he was originally targeting a 2025 departure, but it has now been pushed back to “some time in 2026”), he said he wasn’t deterred.

He said the “why” in his motivations gets back to his goal of always striving to treat other people and the planet with more respect in his daily life.

“By seeing our planet, and all its lands and oceans, from that distance, I’m trying to experience something that can help me in my growth and trajectory as a human,” he said. “We only have one mother, and that’s Mother Earth.”

But Dvorak, who is in his 60s, said in examining his motivations, he also suspects there’s a basic exploration instinct at play, as well.

“When they asked Edmund Hillary, ‘Why did you climb Everest?’ He supposedly said, ‘because it’s there,'” Dvorak said with a laugh. “The technology is there — vetted and relatively affordable.”