PORT CANAVERAL, Fla. – The weekend getaway was a success for Space Perspective, the company that has more than 1,800 people waiting for their chance to take a balloon ride to the edge of space in a fancy capsule.

The Neptune-Excelsior spacecraft completed its first unmanned test flight, reaching an altitude of 100,000 feet, a big step for the Brevard County-based space tourism company toward its first trip with humans on board next year.

“I could have been there,” said Jane Poynter, co-founder of Space Perspective, on Thursday as she boarded the company ship MS Voyager, which brought the capsule back to port. “It worked so well. Everything went so well.”

The MS in the ship’s name stands for “Marine Spaceport.” The ship departed Port Canaveral last week, traveling down the coast and into the Gulf of Mexico to conduct its final test flight off the coast of St. Petersburg on Sunday.

Many of the company’s 130 employees and their families were on hand to welcome the ship into port as it docked alongside SpaceX recovery vessels at North Cargo Berth 8, while a lone Carnival cruise ship docked on the other side of the port’s turning basin.

Poynter approached the ship with his arms outstretched in a welcoming gesture and a broad grin before shouting welcome greetings to many of the 38 crew members on board.

The sun reflected off the 16-foot-diameter silver metal sphere with a teardrop-shaped shaft, which was embedded in a holder aboard the ship like a giant golf ball on a tee, except that it was additionally held in place by cables attached to steel beams anchored to the ship’s deck.

The main feature of the capsule, however, was the reflection of the blue sky and white clouds. According to the company, these are the largest windows ever built for an aircraft of this altitude and are designed to provide a 360-degree view during the flight.

“One of the challenges of space travel is that at high altitudes and without an atmosphere, you have to get rid of heat,” Poynter said. “The bigger the windows, the more heat you have to get rid of, because the heat comes in during the day when we’re flying.”

She said the team put a lot of work into different types of film for the windows that keep out the heat but don’t spoil the view.

The altitude reached during the flight is not considered space altitude, but is almost 30 kilometers. This is the company’s goal so that customers can see the curvature of the Earth and the blackness of space.

Virgin Galactic’s significantly more expensive suborbital rocket launches take place at an altitude of over 80 kilometers, which the Federal Aviation Administration considers space flight. Blue Origin’s suborbital New Shepard rockets cross the Karman line at an altitude of over 100 kilometers – the internationally recognized altitude for space flight.

However, Space Perspective is tapping into a market that requires no training and can fly much more frequently. The company is also touting the carbon-neutral aspect of the flights, which only require hydrogen gas for the balloon to take off.

The effort, which began in 2019, has gained momentum since 2023. Poynter said she expects to be among the first people to make the first manned spaceflight in 2025, with customer flights possible either late next year or early 2026.

“18 months ago, we barely had a part ready,” she said. “So it took about 18 months to build it, test it and fly it, and so I think that’s incredibly fast. I mean, to say that again, normally development takes years and years and years.”

The company had already conducted another unmanned flight in 2021 with a stripped-down test capsule, but this one was intended to replicate the experiences people would have on a trip.

“We had all the pressure control systems, the thermal control systems, the atmosphere control systems, the humidity control systems,” Poynter said. “I mean, basically everything you need to have people on board.”

She said the water speed was about 17.7 km/h.

“The flight was very smooth throughout the flight and accessibility will be very good,” she said, noting that the company’s potential customer base will largely have no age or mobility limitations.

The MS Voyager’s home port is actually Fort Pierce, but it is currently using Port Canaveral to pick up and drop off the capsule.

The ship is equipped with a machine that looks like the world’s largest toffee machine. It is a mechanism with four giant rollers in succession that serve to bring the balloon into its starting position during takeoff.

The capsule is being built at the company’s facilities in Brevard County, along with the 550-foot-long (167-meter-long) space balloons needed to take it to that altitude. The capsule hangs another 100 feet below the balloon, so it measures 650 feet from top to bottom during flight. It’s also quite wide.

“When the balloon is fully expanded, it’s over 300 feet in diameter,” said Taber MacCallum, the company’s other co-founder. “So you could take a football field and just spin it inside the balloon.”

He said that while the balloon will rise to a level higher than 99 percent of the Earth’s atmosphere, the interior will be similar to a flight. The capsules will be set up like a cozy lounge where passengers will be served food and cocktails and have access to Wi-Fi and even a toilet.

“The cabin feels like a business jet, except it’s much bigger and the view is better,” he said.

However, the test flight was not without problems.

“There are always things,” he said. “We had some communications anomalies and some control anomalies on some parts of the clearance systems, so there was always a lot out there, like there always was the first time.”

Nevertheless, the venture was considered a success because the capsule was equipped with numerous cameras and sensors to prove that it could maintain cabin pressure and stability while maintaining a comfortable temperature inside. It also allowed recovery procedures to be tested after splashdown.

“Our most important achievement was that we showed that we have a working capsule,” he said. “It is temperature and pressure controlled. We have a balloon that we built ourselves that will take us to the edge of space.”

The next step will be to sift through terabytes of collected data, watch the video footage and compare it to what MacCallum called a digital twin, a computer model that shows what the company expects to see in terms of “every aspect of life support, thermal control, structure, pressure, ascent, speed, splashdown and all of those things,” he said.

Changes are then incorporated into the next capsule.

Once the flights, which cost $125,000 per person, are complete, eight crew members plus a captain will be on flights lasting about six hours, with two hours to climb to the desired altitude, two hours to hover above the ground, and two hours to descend and splash down at sea.

“I would say we have such a high demand that the price will probably go up before it goes down,” Poynter said. “But our long-term vision, of course, is to really bring the price down dramatically.”

“Maybe in the future we can bring another product online where we can really lower the price dramatically so that more and more people can enjoy this incredible experience.”

Launch plans have changed since the project began. Originally, launches were to take place from the former Space Shuttle landing facility at Kennedy Space Center in the Gulf of Mexico, but now the company is sticking with maritime launch vehicles.

“We’ll be able to fly from Miami. Maybe we’ll fly from Puerto Rico. We’ll also fly from the Gulf side in the Keys,” Poynter said of the company’s initial plans. “We’ll be able to move around, and it also depends on the time of year, because we have to make sure the weather is really good there.”

Long-term plans are planned on a much larger scale.

“We’ll take it slow at first, but we plan to get to about 140 flights per location per year and then have multiple locations around the world,” Poynter said.