The French company Zephalto wants to offer luxurious trips to the stratosphere with the help of giant balloons from 2025. Bloomberg reports, citing company founder Vincent Farret d’Astiès. The six-hour flights are said to cost EUR 120,000 per person and reach an altitude of 25 km.
This is not space tourism, but at this altitude you have 98 percent of the earth’s atmosphere below you, seemingly dark space around you and you can admire the curvature of the earth, says Farret d’Astiès. You only have to do without the weightlessness of space flights. Zephalto is not the first company to offer such flights, so they want to stand out from the competition with the comfort and quality of the food and drinks available, among other things.
A new tourism industry in the making?
As Bloomberg quotes, six passengers per flight should be able to sit in the capsules, which are attached to huge helium or hydrogen balloons. There will also be two pilots on board, is what Zephalto says. From a location in France, the capsules will then ascend for an hour and a half and then glide through the heights for three hours.
The view is the same as that previously reserved for astronauts. The return to the earth’s surface should then take another hour and a half. In total, Zephalto plans about 60 flights per year, which would be a little more than one per week. The trips could be tackled without prior training and, thanks to the balloons, should be much more comfortable than, for example, the minute-long trips to the frontier of space offered by Blue Origin (with rockets) or Virgin Galactic (with a space glider). How big the market for it is is unclear.
The idea of using stratospheric balloons to fly to such heights that the experience at least resembles a trip into space is not new. Just a few weeks ago, a Japanese start-up announced that it wanted to start carrying people several dozen kilometers up in the air before the end of this year. The declared goal is therefore “to make space tourism accessible to everyone”. In view of the starting price of 180,000 US dollars per flight, this can be doubted, even the targeted price of “several tens of thousands of US dollars” is certainly not affordable “for everyone”. In addition, while the capsules used there do not look very comfortable, the US company Space Perspective has already announced flights in 2020 that are much more similar to those planned by Zephalto. According to Bloomberg, this should start next year.
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