The trip would take between four and five hours, including two to reach 35 km high, at the gates of space. Pulled by a stratospheric balloon inflated with carbon-free hydrogen, produced by electrolysis of water and renewable electricity (wind turbine and solar panel), the shuttle would stabilize for half an hour at this altitude to allow the six passengers accompanied by two pilots to go out on the outside balcony in astronaut suits. The descent to dry land would be done gently, using a sail housed on the warhead-shaped capsule.
This is the promise of Stratoflight, the start-up created in 2019 in Labège (Haute-Garonne), a few kilometers from Toulouse, a regional metropolis which boasts of being the European space capital with 120,000 employees in 400 companies. To make this idea of a balloon trip into the stratosphere a reality, born from the desire of its founder, Arnaud Longobardi, an airline pilot at Air France and a top athlete experienced in mini-sailing and paragliding flights, the company is backed by an engineering and consulting giant, Expleo (15,000 employees, 1 billion euros in revenue in 2021).
For eighteen months, a Toulouse team of ten engineers attached to the company’s innovation laboratory worked on the temperature resistance of this shuttle, which measures eight meters long and four meters wide, on the on-board electronics and the design aerodynamic.
“Exclusive deal”
Observing the curvature of the Earth about twenty kilometers above the ground, with one’s head in the stars, is also the dream of Vincent Farret d’Astiès, former air traffic controller at the General Directorate of Civil Aviation (DGAC). To carry out his six-hour trip project aboard Céleste – a pressurized cabin pulled by a helium-filled balloon – the forty-something manager of Zephalto, whose headquarters are in Pouget (Hérault), set up, in June, its prototyping manufacturing workshop in Escalquens, in the Toulouse suburbs, to be closer to the National Center for Space Studies (CNES).
“We have just signed an exclusive agreement with our partnerannounces Vincent Farret d’Astiès. This will allow us to access patents on CNES balloon technologies, its tools and facilities for carrying out tests. And our operators will be trained by its teams in inflating the balloon, launching it and managing the flight. » Even if the tests, on the ground and in flight, are planned for 2023, and the first flight scheduled for the end of 2024, 500 people are already ready to pay 120,000 euros to make the trip.
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