A French “low-carbon” space travel company founded by a former air traffic controller is aiming to take tourists to the edge of space for lunch with a view, as early as next year.
Zephalto is selling pre-registration tickets for the six-hour experience – which will cost €120,000 (£104,000) – asking for €10,000 (£8,714) up front.
The company was founded by Vincent Farret d’Astiès, who previously worked at France’s Direction Generale de l’Aviation Civile (DGAC) as an air traffic controller and is partnering with France’s space agency, the Centre national d’études spatiales (CNES). A spokesperson for Zephalto told CNN Travel that seats on the first flights “from late 2024 to mid-2025” are now sold out, with pre-reservation slots for mid-2025 onwards now available.
The journey would be undertaken in Celeste, a pressurised capsule and hydrogen- or helium-filled balloon “the size of the Sacré Coeur in Paris”, ascending from one of Zephalto’s spaceports (it currently has one, in France) – its aim is to have one on each of the Earth’s continents.
While the six passengers and two pilots won’t quite get the view afforded to astronauts on board the International Space Station, they would be able to see the curvature of the Earth and blue line of the atmosphere as the balloon and caspule ascend to a height of around 16 miles (25km) over 90 minutes.
After a Michelin-star-calibre meal, the passengers would then enjoy wine tasting at altitude, as the capsule remains high in the atmosphere – experiencing the darkness of space – for around three hours before descending back down to Earth. The altitude means that passengers won’t experience weightlessness.
Zephalto claims that it will offer “the least polluting way to reach the stratosphere” with a total 26.6kg of carbon for each flight, compared to 4.5 tonnes per passenger for a sub-orbital rocket-based flight. It intends to offer up to 60 flights per year.
It is not the first company aiming to take tourists into space. As well as Sir Richard Branson’s Virgin Galactic and Jeff Bezos’s Blue Origin, start-ups such as Space Perspective have ambitious plans to launch craft into the atmosphere in the coming years. Space Perspective’s hydrogen-powered “carbon neutral SpaceBalloon” and capsule Neptune – complete with Wi-Fi and cocktails – will launch from sea on the Marine Spaceport MS Voyager and from Florida’s Space Coast.