Voyage 08 · departs 2 May 2027
Terminator
A sun-synchronous orbit flown along the line between day and night. Four days in which the sun never sets.
- Days in orbit
- 4
- Altitude
- 540 km
- Inclination
- 97.6°
- Seats
- 3 / 4
The ground track: one orbit, drawn on a flat map of the Earth.
What that plan means
You will go round 60 times, once every 95.3 minutes, and the sun will not set once. The voyage covers 2,624,655 kilometres at 7.59 kilometres a second, and at no point will it feel like moving.
Flown along the terminator: the craft never enters the night side, so the sun stays low on the horizon for the entire voyage and every window faces a sunrise or a sunset.
$5.6 million per seat, all preparation included
Terminator is the strangest voyage on the manifest, and the one photographers ask for. The orbit is tilted just past the pole, at 97.6 degrees, and timed so that the craft rides the line between day and night the whole way round. You never enter Earth’s shadow. You never leave the edge of it.
The result is four days of a sun sitting on the horizon. Every landscape below is raked by light from the side; mountains and cloud towers are drawn in their own shadows; and on one side of the cabin it is always sunrise and on the other always sunset.
Because the orbit crosses both poles, Terminator is also the only voyage from which you see the whole of Antarctica and the Arctic ice in a single day.
