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If you are a frequent forward-cabin flyer, you come to expect certain things: a comfortable and spacious seat, reliable Wi-Fi, and a quality meal with an accompanying cocktail. These amenities are commonplace at 35,000 feet, but a new tourism company is about to take the luxury flight experience to all-new heights — 100,000 feet, to be exact.

Space Perspective, the world’s first stratospheric balloon flight experience company, completed its first uncrewed test flight Sept. 15, 2024. The successful test flight marked a major milestone, and it paved the way for future commercial flights and the company’s first manned flight, which will take place in 2025.

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TPG spoke with Space Perspective co-founder Taber MacCallum and interim CEO Michael Savage to learn more about the company’s unique brand of space tourism and what the experience will entail.

What is Space Perspective?

Without a rocket, how does Space Perspective transport travelers to the stratosphere and return them safely to Earth? It’s all thanks to the Spaceship Neptune — a spherical pressurized capsule measuring 16 feet in diameter that can accommodate up to eight passengers and a captain.

The journey begins at Marine Spaceport Voyager, a 294-foot-long vessel that acts as the launch and retrieval point for Space Perspective’s spacecraft. The Voyager currently calls Cape Canaveral, Florida, home but is designed to launch from marine-based sites across the globe.

According to MacCallum, a typical flight will start in the morning (though if you purchase a ticket, I assume you will have some sway over your launch time). “We’ll inflate the balloon so it’s standing up over the capsule with the capsule secured to the deck of the Voyager,” he explained. “Then the passengers will enter the capsule, and we’ll give a safety briefing, similar to a preflight briefing on a commercial airliner.”

The Spaceship Netptune capsule is then gently lifted from Voyager via Space Perspective’s patented SpaceBalloon.

When the capsule is released from the launch vessel, it will gently ascend at about 12 miles per hour for two hours, a rate at which MacCallum likened to bicycling speed. “Then we stay floating on top of the Earth’s atmosphere at 100,000 feet [the highest altitude of any commercial balloon flight in the world] for a couple of hours.”

MacCallum continued: “Then we begin the descent, which is sort of the reverse of the ascent. We go down for about two hours to get to the splashdown [where a Splashcone at the capsule’s base will facilitate a gentle water landing] and then the retrieval ship is waiting for us at the splashdown location.”

Boats will stabilize the capsule and lift it back onto the Voyager, a process that takes about 20 minutes.

My most pressing question for MacCallum had nothing to do with the technology and expertise that made this all possible. I was simply dying to know where the name Neptune came from. MacCallum’s answer did not disappoint.

“It came to me in a dream,” MacCallum told me. “I literally had a dream saying, ‘It’s the Spaceship Neptune.’”

It certainly has a nice ring to it, but true to MacCallum’s long history with ballooning and space travel, it holds a significant scientific meaning as well. “What’s fun about the name Neptune is that the atmosphere of the planet Neptune is largely helium and hydrogen,” he explained. Neptune’s atmosphere is essentially made of the types of “lift gas” used to lift balloons into the air.

Who regulates space tourism?

When you combine a marine-based launch point and a spacecraft, you get, in MacCallum’s words, “a lot of regulators.”

“Everything we have that flies and all of the ground operations connected to everything that flies is regulated by the Federal Aviation Administration’s Office of Commercial Space Transportation as a spacecraft,” MacCallum explained. “And everything we do shipboard is regulated by the Coast Guard.”

Though the FAA does not have a defining limit for what is considered the edge of space, it does classify any vehicle intended to operate about 30 kilometers (or about 98,000 feet) with people inside it as a spacecraft.

“Once you’re at 30 kilometers or above, you are essentially in space,” MacCallum said. “It’s essentially a vacuum, and you have all of the thermal, radiation and navigation concerns of an aircraft.”

Even if Space Perspective does one day launch from sites outside of the U.S., it will still be regulated as a spacecraft under the Outer Space Treaty of 1969. “No matter where we are on the planet, we’re U.S. citizens and a U.S.-run operation, so we will always be regulated by the FAA,” MacCallum explained. Most countries are signatories to the treaty, giving Space Perspective the ability to operate worldwide.

A focus on the passenger experience

From the moment you take off to the moment you land, Space Perspective will provide the comfort, space and amenities to let you fully enjoy this remarkable experience.

The capsule is surrounded by floor-to-ceiling windows for panoramic views of the scenic journey above Earth. The seats are designed with safety and comfort elements that rival that of any commercial aircraft, and you’ll enjoy a world-class food and beverage service while on board.

Even the restroom, dubbed the “Space Spa,” would put the restroom in a first-class airplane cabin to shame. The Space Spa is beautifully designed with a soothing color scheme and windows that allow for uninterrupted views even when nature calls.

The team at Space Perspective didn’t miss a single detail when designing the Neptune capsule and the inflight experience; this included the chance to work with Sir Richard Branson, who will be a co-pilot on the first crewed flight. The other co-pilots will be MacCallum and his wife, Jane Poynter, who is a co-founder of Space Perspective.

“Richard is a very experienced balloonist,” Savage told TPG. Branson’s involvement goes above and beyond that of a typical investor. “This is something he is personally very enthusiastic about, and he brings that expertise to the table along with his commitment to the customer experience.”

While Branson wasn’t formally involved early on, it’s clear that the team at Space Perspective shares his spirit for exceeding customer expectations. “There are challenges that come with things like flying the largest windows in space, but we made it happen because Jane wanted to drive experience,” Savage said.

Prioritizing customer experience similarly informed the layout of the capsule. “We originally thought that everyone would want a seat right in front of their window, and there would be sort of a ring of seats,” MacCallum said. “We immediately realized that this is a social experience that people want to share with each other and rearranged the cabin into two sets of four sort of hemispherical seats that better facilitate that kind of interaction.”

The extended six-hour flight time also gives guests time to savor their time in space in a way that resonates with them. “One of the reasons that having time is important is that you can meditate on the amazing views if you want to, interact with the other people, or have the ultimate Facebook status update,” MacCallum said.

If you want to be among the fortunate few who can tag their Facebook location as “space,” you’ll need $125,000 to purchase a standard ticket for a Space Perspective flight. To date, Space Perspective has sold more than 1,800 reservations.

Many of those are for families or friend groups who want to go on the ultimate getaway, but Space Perspective has received some pretty “out of this world” requests, as well. “We already have people who have bought several tickets because they want to fly and see Italy after seeing all of Florida from the edge of space,” MacCallum said.

He also revealed that the company has been approached by several artists who want to be the first to release music from space; one passenger wants to remove some of the seats and put in a grand piano to perform in space.

Though the journey is designed to last for six hours, the capsule could stay up much longer. “Our long-term road map could include overnight experiences,” Savage said. “We have the ability to design custom experiences, and as we get going, I’m sure we will have a lot of fun things people can do.”

How does it differ from other types of space tourism?

Unlike other experiences offered by space tourism companies, a Space Perspective flight is slow and gentle. Rather than a speeding journey to space and the weightlessness and g-forces that come along with it, a Space Perspective flight is closer to the experience of flying in an airplane.

That doesn’t mean the two experiences are in competition with one another. MacCallum shared that Branson even sees the two as complementary. “Someone who is too scared to travel on a rocket might do this first,” he said. “They are such different experiences that he doesn’t really see them as competing at all.”

“If people want that thrill and go up into space to a point where they are weightless, you can do that and have a great experience,” Savage said. Space Perspective, on the other hand, provides the type of transformative experience that astronauts describe after seeing Earth from a different vantage point.

“Many astronauts will tell you that they became an astronaut to go explore space, but what they discovered was that their relationship to Earth was forever changed,” Savage explained.

“The slow ascent and descent Space Perspective provides gives you an understanding of scale that you don’t get with a rocket. You can look out the window and see your neighborhood and then your community and your state and realize, ‘Maybe this Earth isn’t as big as I thought it was and I should take better care of it,’” he added.

By the end of the journey, passengers will have spent six hours traveling to and from the stratosphere, with two full hours built in to look down on our planet from a vantage point very few will ever reach.

Space Perspective is set on making this life-changing journey accessible to as many people as possible.

“Imagine if every school had a teacher who’d actually been to space,” Savage, whose two sisters are school teachers, said. “They could talk to kids about space exploration, and it would affect radical change.”

“There are already charities forming to send people like teachers and other leaders to space,” MacCallum shared. “There is one called Space for Humanity that is raising money to send people on experiences like this. They’ve already sent people on Virgin Galactic and Blue Origin, so there is a very large and growing philanthropic component to sending people to space.”

Bottom line

Space was once considered the final frontier (according to “Star Trek,” at least). Now, Space Perspective will soon take passengers “where no man has gone before” in luxury and comfort.

With high-end amenities, panoramic views and a gentle, six-hour flight to soak it all in, Space Perspective’s “atmospheric” journey to the stratosphere is redefining the meaning of space tourism.

Related reading:

• Private islands and space flights: The most exclusive travel experiences you can book with points
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• What it’s like to watch a space launch from Virgin Galactic’s spaceport
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