The weekend trip was a success Space PerspectiveA company that currently has more than 1,800 people waiting for the chance to travel to the edge of space in a luxury capsule by hot air balloon. Neptune-Excelsior It climbed to an altitude of 100,000 feet and made its first unmanned test flight, a big step toward the Brevard County space tourism company’s first manned launch next year.

“I could be in on this,” Space Perspective co-founder Jane Poynter said Thursday as she climbed aboard the company’s MS Voyager ship that brought the capsule back to port. “It worked out great. Everything went very well.”

The MS in the ship’s name means “sea spaceport.” The aircraft left Port Canaveral last week and headed toward the Gulf of Mexico for a test flight Sunday off the coast of St. Petersburg.

Many of the company’s 130 employees and their families were there to welcome the ship into port as it docked alongside other SpaceX ships at North Cargo Dock #8, while a lone Carnival cruise ship pulled into port across the water.

Poynter walked toward the ship with his arms outstretched in a welcoming gesture, grinning from ear to ear before shouting welcome home to most of the 38 crew members on board.

The sun was shining on a sixteen-foot diameter silver metal sphere with a teardrop handle that rested in a cradle on the side of the ship, like a gigantic golf ball on a golf course, but was also held in place by cables attached to steel girders fixed to the ship’s deck.

The reflection of the blue sky and white clouds, however, was the capsule’s main feature, with what the company calls the largest windows ever built for something flying at this altitude, designed to provide a 360-degree view during flight.

“One of the problems with spaceflight is that when you’re high up, there’s no atmosphere, you actually have to get rid of heat,” Poynter says. “The bigger the portholes, the more heat has to be dissipated, because when we fly during the day, heat goes through the ceiling.”

According to him, the team worked hard on different types of films for the portholes that can retain heat but not change the appearance. The height reached during the flight is not considered space, but the company’s goal is about 30 kilometers, so customers can see the curvature of the Earth and the darkness of space.

Virgin Galactic’s much more expensive suborbital rocket climbs to altitudes of more than 50 miles, which the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration considers spaceflight. Blue Origin’s New Shepard suborbital rockets fly above the Karman Line at altitudes of more than 62 miles, the internationally accepted altitude for spaceflight.

Space PerspectiveBut it’s targeting a market that doesn’t require training and can fly much more frequently. In addition, the company is touting the carbon-neutral aspect of the trip, which only requires hydrogen gas to lift the balloon into the air.

The initiative, which began in 2019, has been ramping up rapidly since 2023, and Poynter says he expects to be among the first to fly a human into space in 2025, with customer flights possible late next year or early 2026.

“So 18 months ago we just had one part built,” he said. “So it took us about 18 months to build it, test it and get it up and running, so I think that’s incredibly fast. I mean, it usually takes years and years and years to develop.”

The company made another uncrewed flight with a split test capsule in 2021, but that flight was designed to approximate what a human would experience during the journey.

“We have all the pressure control systems, temperature control systems, atmosphere control systems, humidity control systems,” Poynter said. “So, pretty much everything you need to bring people together.”

He said the fall speed was about 11 mph.

“The flight was very smooth throughout and will be very approachable,” he said, noting that the company’s potential customer base will not be greatly affected by age or mobility.

MS Voyager is actually based in Fort Pierce but currently uses Port Canaveral for capsule pick-up and drop-off. The ship is equipped with the world’s largest candy machine, a mechanism with four large pulleys that is used to inflate the balloon during takeoff.

The capsule was built at the company’s facility in Brevard County, along with the 1,700-foot space balls needed to lift it to that height. The capsule hangs 100 feet below the balloon, so it’s 650 feet from top to bottom in flight. It also has a lot of room.

“When extended, the sphere is over 300 feet in diameter,” says Taber McCallum, the company’s other co-founder. “You could take a football field and spin it around.”

Although the balloon will reach an altitude exceeding 99% of the Earth’s atmosphere, he said the interior will be similar to flying on an airplane. The capsules will house passengers in a comfortable lounge area where they will be offered food and cocktails, as well as Wi-Fi and even access to a toilet.

“The cabin of an airliner feels just like a business jet, except it’s much bigger and has better visibility,” he says.

The test flight did not go smoothly.

“There’s always something going on,” he said. “We had some communication anomalies, there were some control anomalies in some parts of the launch systems, so there was a lot of stuff going on, just like the first flights.”

However, the project was deemed a success as the capsule was equipped with various cameras and sensors to prove that it could maintain cabin pressure and stability while maintaining a comfortable temperature, and to test post-crash rescue operations.

“The most important thing we’ve accomplished is to show that we have a capsule that works,” he said. “It’s temperature-controlled, it’s pressure-controlled. We have a bullet that will take us to the edge of our own space.”

The next step will be to analyze the terabytes of data collected, reviewing the images and comparing it to what McCallum calls a digital doppelganger; “every aspect of life support, thermoregulation, structure, pressure, buoyancy, speed, bounce, all of those things,” the company said.

Changes will be made in the next capsule.

Once completed, the flights, currently costing $125,000 per person, will involve a crew of eight and a captain flying for about six hours, during which they will gain altitude for two hours, hover above Earth for two hours and then descend to Earth’s ocean for two hours.

“We have such demand that, frankly, the price is probably going to go up before it goes down,” Poynter said. “But frankly, our long-term vision is to really reduce that dramatically.”

“Maybe in the future we will have another product that we will bring online that will allow us to significantly lower the price so that more people can have this incredible experience.”

Launch plans have changed since the company was founded. Initially, launches were planned to take place from the Kennedy Space Center’s old spaceport with landings in the Gulf of Mexico, but now the company has settled on naval rocket ships.

“We’ll be able to fly out of Miami. We’ll do a few flights, maybe even out of Puerto Rico. We’ll do some flights out of the gulf side near the Keys,” Poynter said of the company’s initial plans. “We’ll be able to move, and it depends on the time of year because we have to make sure the weather is really nice.”

Long-term plans require a much larger scale.

“We’re not going to be in a rush to start, but we plan to do about 140 flights a year to a single destination and then have multiple locations around the world,” Poynter says.