Soon, you’ll be able to pay for a balloon ride into space

Carlos Mira, the CEO of Halo Space, remembers watching Apollo 11 land on the moon.

The moment ignited a passion that he has spent his whole life pursuing. He began skydiving at the age of 18 and has since clocked more than 1,000 jumps.

But Mira, who is also a pilot, hasn’t made it to space yet.

Halo Space, in part, is a way for him to get there.

Founded in 2021, Halo Space is a straight-up space tourism company. The Spanish company’s mission is to safely and sustainably fly people to the very edge of space – specifically, about 20 miles above sea level – to allow people to witness the curvature of the planet, the depths of space and the famed “blue halo,” a blue ring around Earth that can only be viewed from certain vantage points.

Commercial airplanes, in comparison, fly between five and seven miles above sea level.

Halo Space, which is still in the midst of a lengthy testing phase, is designing a zero-emission capsule that will take eight passengers (plus a pilot) above 99.5% of Earth’s atmosphere. That remaining .5% is covered by a distance of roughly 40 miles.

The capsule is propelled by an enormous, hydrogenfilled stratospheric balloon, which allows the journey to move at the leisurely pace of 12 mph.

All told, a ride on one of Halo Space’s capsules will take between four and six hours, and is devoid of a bunch of rocket-specific features, including rocket fuel, small windows, Gforce and heavy acceleration.

“The beauty of our concept is that every key element that we use is mature technology and fully tested,” Mira said, noting that the stratospheric balloons that will propel Halo’s capsules have been in use for around 100 years – Auguste Piccard, a Swiss researcher, flew 52,000 feet into the air in 1932, propelled by the world’s first stratospheric balloon.

“We are meeting all the milestones that we were planning when we started in 2021,” Mira added.

Halo Space completed its first test flight in December 2022, and is now gearing up for its sixth test flight, which will be conducted in Saudi Arabia in June. Each of Halo’s previous test flights tested one specific component of the vehicle; the first tested the vehicle’s ability to climb to a given altitude and the fifth tested landing and descent systems. Across the previous five tests,

Mira said that all of the capsule’s “critical systems” have been tested individually.

The sixth test will be the first to test all of these critical systems together.

“Something which is important is that when you go for a test flight if you try to test everything at once, you don’t get the same kind of robustness of the testing as if you’re doing it by phases, which is what we have done,” Mira said.

Halo Space plans to begin commercial flights in 2026, and Mira hopes to be on board the first one. The company is expecting to conduct 16 tests in the intervening time, though Mira added that the number is an estimation, saying that Halo might go commercial with more or fewer tests than currently anticipated.

Halo Space has said that it expects to take 10,000 people up to the tip of the stratosphere by the end of the decade. This estimation is based on the company’s expectation of conducting a minimum of 100 flights from its four global bases in Spain, the U.S., Australia and Saudi Arabia per year, beginning in 2026.

Despite the company’s assertion that Halo offers one of the most accessible options to get up to the edge of space, the cost of a single ticket – starting at $164,000 – isn’t exactly cheap. Still, Mira thinks that this price point is “where the space tourism market is.”