Space Perspective Starts Selling Balloon Rides 19 Miles Up

Now is the time to book a seat on a gentle balloon journey to the edge of space.

Florida-based company Space Perspective has started to take reservations for flights in 2024 on its Spaceship Neptune, a pressurized capsule that will be carried by a stadium-sized balloon.

The ticket price of the six-hour breathtaking journey to view the blackness of space and Earth’s roundness is $125,000 per seat.

Space Perspective says it is reimagining space travel. “Instead of rocketing away from the Earth at high velocity, you ascend on a gentle, yet thrilling journey and look back at our planet from an entirely new perspective.” says the company.

Image credit: Space Perspective

To achieve this goal, Space Perspective made its successful historical first test flight to reach an altitude of 108,409 feet (33,043 meters) on June 18th. The uncrewed flight took off from the Space Coast Spaceport in Florida and lasted six hour and 39 minutes before splashing down in the Gulf of Mexico.

“I could not be more proud of the performance of the team and the flight system. It was spectacular to witness the teamwork and the high level of expertise yield such a successful result,” said Taber MacCallum, Space Perspective co-CEO and founder.

Image credit: Space Perspective

“This test flight of Neptune One kicks off our extensive test flight campaign, which will be extremely robust because we can perform tests without a pilot, making Spaceship Neptune an extremely safe way to go to space,” he added.

The aforementioned flight carried a number of payloads, including Higher Orbits — an educational nonprofit that uses space to promote STEAM in cooperation with astronauts and students, per Space Perspective.

In April 2001, US millionaire Dennis Tito, who was sent by a Russian Soyuz rocket, became the world’s first space tourist to arrive at the International Space Station.

Dennis Tito, world’s first space tourist. Photo: Oleg Nikishin/RTV/Newsmakers/Getty Images

Richard Branson’s Virgin Galactic and Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin are also working towards space tourism.

According to CNBC, the Federal Aviation Administration granted Virgin Galactic the license that is needed to fly passengers on future spaceflights, as its VSS Unity completed its first successful space flight last month.

VSS Unity is able to host up to six passengers and two pilots and each should pay $250,000.

In the previous days, Blue Origin sold the spare seat of the 11-minute flight for $28 million that is scheduled to lift off on July 20 from Van Horn, Texas.

The winner will be on the company’s New Shepard space rocket to join Bezos and his brother Mark. Although the capsule will carry 6 passengers, their names are still unknown, except for the Bezos brothers.