Here’s What a $125,000 Luxury Balloon Ride to Space Gets You

The space tourism industry is blasting off—and while most of the focus has been on rocket-propelled efforts like SpaceX’s Inspiration4 mission or Blue Origin’s attempts to rid the world of Pete Davidson there are those taking a less traditional approach.

That’s the case with Space Perspective, a company that plans to use balloons to send people to space… sort of. For the low, low price of $125,000, you can snag a seat on a luxury capsule dubbed Spaceship Neptune where you’ll be able to drink cocktails, eat hor d'oeuvres, and laugh at all the plebeians on terra firma from the stratosphere. Sure, it’s just the edge of space, but it’s pretty darn close.

The capsule itself will provide a full panoramic view of Earth and the surrounding cosmos, complete with a comfortable lounge area, bar, and even a toilet (you’ll be drinking after all). The entire experience lasts six hours—so a little more than $20,800 per hour for those keeping track.

After reaching the stratosphere and watching the sun rise over the horizon, the balloon would then descend towards the Earth, making a safe splashdown in the ocean where a boat will be waiting to pick up all the newly minted space tourists. The maiden flight is set to take off from Kennedy Space Center in Merritt Island, Florida, in 2024.

While it’s certainly a unique—albeit nerve-wracking—method of space travel, balloons have actually been used to study the upper reaches of the atmosphere for decades now. They’ve even been used to send humans up to the edge of space before, like when Austrian skydiver Felix Baumgartner used a helium balloon to ascend to the stratosphere before jumping back to Earth in 2012.

In fact, the balloon the company is using and developing—creatively named SpaceBalloon—is a “type and design that NASA’s been flying for many years,” Taber MacCallum, co-founder and co-CEO of Space Perspective, told The Daily Beast. With it, he said that the flight will offer the “zero-emission way to travel to space” in a “warm, inviting, and safe environment.”

The method also makes the price tag much smaller when compared to other space tourism efforts like the recent Axiom mission, which cost its billionaire crew $55 million each. After all, Space Perspective won’t have to spend money on the fuel and technology required to actually send a person to space. You also don’t need to train nearly as much as an astronaut as well.

“This was really the culmination of figuring out how to get the quintessential astronaut experience without having to spend $55 million on a rocket to go to orbit,” MacCallum said. “I mean, I’m totally into what others are doing. This is just a different approach—very gentle, very accessible, and lots of time since a six-hour flight.”

Along with the promise of luxury space travel, the company is also selling customers on an experience called the overview effect. This is a phrase that describes a psychological shift often reported by astronauts who have seen the Earth from space and say it helped them gain a true understanding of the planet’s fragility and cosmic insignificance.

“That sense of scale seems to be a really important aspect of understanding how big our Earth is,” MacCallum explained. “And that provides the context of, we’re all one human family on this Earth stuck out in the middle of space.”

This is what puts the perspective in Space Perspective. MacCallum even added that the experience is profound enough that it might have a global impact if world leaders took part. He added that he’d be interested in curating a guest list of such tourists. “You can have a politician, you could have the Dalai Lama, you could have the pope,” he said.

It’s fairly abstract, but the overview effect is exactly why some tourists are shelling out big bucks to take part in the trip. “It’s expensive for sure, but it’s more affordable than a $55 million ticket for a 10-day mission to the International Space Station,” Roman Chiporukha, a luxury travel consultant and a Space Perspective customer, told The Daily Beast.

“While you don’t get the weightlessness, I think you get to see the sun come up over the curvature of the Earth,” he added. “I think that’s going to be an incredible feeling to be able to see our planet this way. You see it suspended in the darkness of the cosmos. That’s incredible.”

While The Daily Beast was unable to verify how many customers like Chiporukha have booked a ride with Space Perspective, representatives from World View—a company offering a similar balloon-to-space experience—told us that it already secured more than 1,000 reservations for future ascents to the stratosphere. So demand for this kind of space tourism is certainly there, and when it’s offered at a lower price point—not to mention with significantly less training—it creates a big draw for anyone who wants to play astronaut but doesn’t have a spare $55 million laying around.

So, if and when Space Perspective takes off, it’ll mark a new era for space tourism: one that’s cheaper, requires less training, and lets you kick back with a martini while you do it.