Justin Sun, founder of the Tron blockchain, traveled to space in August 2025 aboard Blue Origin’s New Shepard NS-34 mission. The flight took place on August 3, 2025, marking the company’s 14th human spaceflight and coming four years after Sun won an auction for the seat with a $28 million bid.

Sun had initially been expected to fly in 2021 alongside Blue Origin founder Jeff Bezos, but scheduling issues postponed his trip. He eventually joined the manifest. The suborbital flight launched from Blue Origin’s spaceport in West Texas, lasted about 10 minutes and returned to Earth under parachutes less than nine minutes after launch.

Sun’s flight provided a concrete example of the connection between the cryptocurrency industry and commercial spaceflight. It also highlighted how difficult it can be to determine what a space tourism “ticket” actually costs. As of August 2026, the market includes four fundamentally different experiences: a roughly 30-second period of weightlessness during a parabolic flight, a six-hour balloon journey to the stratosphere, a suborbital rocket flight and an 18-day orbital mission to the International Space Station. Prices range from less than $4,000 to approximately $55 million.

These services are not direct competitors. A parabolic flight and an orbital mission offer different experiences, levels of risk and operating requirements. The market is further complicated by companies that advertise seats on spacecraft that have not yet carried a paying customer, as well as by outdated online price lists. The following review separates operators that have actually flown passengers from those whose services remain announced or in development. That distinction carries practical weight at the moment: as of August 2026, neither rocket-powered suborbital operator is currently flying paying customers, so a deposit paid today generally secures a place in a queue rather than a seat on a dated flight.

What Passengers Are Buying

Four different flight profiles

Parabolic flights do not leave the atmosphere. A specially configured aircraft follows a series of parabolic arcs. At the top of each arc, passengers experience approximately 20 to 30 seconds of weightlessness before gravity returns. A typical flight includes 12 to 15 parabolas, producing about five to eight minutes of weightlessness in total. experience takes place in commercial airspace rather than near the edge of space.

Stratospheric balloon flights carry a pressurized capsule to approximately 100,000 feet, or about 30 kilometers. That altitude remains well below the Kármán line, the internationally accepted boundary of space at 100 kilometers. The ascent and descent take hours, and passengers do not experience weightlessness. Instead, the attraction is a slower journey with views of the curvature of Earth.

Suborbital flights cross the Kármán line, or approach it in Virgin Galactic’s case, using a rocket or rocket plane. Passengers experience several minutes of true microgravity before returning to Earth. The full journey from launch to touchdown generally lasts 10 to 15 minutes. Cryptopolitan previously reported that space ETFs gained attention in 2026 following the SpaceX IPO; that development is separate from the passenger services described here. See Cryptopolitan’s earlier space ETF report.

Orbital missions place passengers into orbit for several days, either in free flight or after docking with the International Space Station. These missions involve astronaut training, extended spaceflight and prices comparable to NASA-level crewed operations.

“Flown” is different from “announced”

The most important distinction when evaluating a space tourism operator is whether it has actually taken passengers into space. Some companies have flown paying customers, while others are accepting deposits or promoting services based on spacecraft that are still being built or tested.

Both models can represent legitimate businesses, but they do not offer the same product. Confusing announced plans with completed flights has contributed to many inaccurate comparisons of space tourism. Each company below is therefore identified by its flown or announced status.

What a booking means

Only a small number of operators offer a confirmed seat with a specific flight date. Blue Origin requires a refundable deposit of at least $150,000 to begin its booking process. Virgin Galactic has more than 675 customers in its reservation system, many of whom made deposits years ago at lower prices without receiving a specific flight date.

Space Perspective sold out several early batches of seats before the former operating entity experienced financial difficulties. Its technological assets were later acquired by EOS-X Space in 2025. The terms attached to a reservation, including whether it is refundable and whether it provides a scheduled flight, are therefore as important as the advertised price.

Tier 1: Parabolic Flights

Zero-G, or Zero Gravity Corporation

Paying passengers flown: Yes. Zero-G has operated flights for the general public since 2004 and is currently the only FAA-certified operator of parabolic flights for the general public in the United States. It is also the only domestic provider of this type of flight for NASA.

Price: Prices have changed over time. A seat cost approximately $4,950 in the early 2010s and about $6,700 by 2020. More recent packages have been priced at roughly $6,700 to $8,850, depending on the seat selected. The exact current price is listed at gozerog.com, making this the entry in this review whose price changes most frequently.

What the flight includes: A specially configured Boeing 727 known as “G-Force One” flies 15 parabolas from an altitude of approximately 32,000 feet. Each parabola produces about 30 seconds of weightlessness, for several minutes in total. Passengers do not need specialized training beyond a safety briefing.

Status: Zero-G’s website indicated that flights were on hold because of maintenance. The company has previously operated from Las Vegas, Washington, D.C. and Cape Canaveral, among other locations.

Best suited to: People seeking the physical sensation of weightlessness without the training and medical examination associated with an altitude flight.

Tier 2: Stratospheric Balloon Flights

Space Perspective and EOS-X Space

Paid commercial passengers flown: Not yet. Space Perspective’s Spaceship Neptune prototype capsule, Excelsior, completed an uncrewed high-altitude test flight to 100,000 feet in September 2024. Neither Space Perspective nor EOS-X Space has flown commercial passengers to date.

Corporate structure and asset purchase: In July 2025, European aerospace company EOS-X Space purchased Space Perspective’s technological assets, intellectual property and capsule designs after the former entity experienced financial difficulties in early 2025, including an eviction notice at its Titusville facility.

The transaction covered technological assets only. EOS-X Space did not acquire the Space Perspective corporate entity and did not assume its legacy liabilities. An earlier version of the article incorrectly stated that EOS-X Space acquired Space Perspective. The correction is important because references to the former company’s financial difficulties, reservations and pricing do not describe EOS-X Space’s current corporate structure.

Pricing: The historical $125,000 ticket price and legacy reservations associated with Space Perspective belong to a discontinued commercial structure. They are not representative of current EOS-X Space offerings. EOS-X Space is incorporating the acquired capsule technology into its own commercial framework and flight roadmap.

Status: In development. EOS-X Space is establishing operations from Florida’s Space Coast and international hubs. Crewed commercial operations remain subject to final regulatory approvals and flight testing.

Best suited to: No current customer category, because commercial flights and updated pricing have not yet been finalized. For customers interested in a high-altitude balloon flight in a pressurized capsule without weightlessness, EOS-X Space is the principal entity to monitor while it develops a new schedule and commercial terms.

Tier 3: Suborbital Spaceflight

Blue Origin’s New Shepard

Commercial paying passengers flown: Yes. New Shepard has completed 38 trips and carried 98 people, representing 92 different passengers, past the Kármán line. Passengers have included Jeff Bezos, William Shatner, who at 90 was the oldest space traveler, 18-year-old Oliver Daemen and Katy Perry, who flew as part of the first all-women team in April 2025.

Price: Blue Origin has never published a standard ticket price. Industry trackers have cited figures ranging from $150,000 to $450,000. Eric Berger, senior space editor at Ars Technica, has said he believes the actual price is considerably higher, potentially close to $1 million or even $2 million to $4 million per passenger.

The publicly known transaction price is the $28 million Justin Sun paid at auction for the first passenger seat. That payment was a special, one-time donation rather than a standard fare. A refundable deposit of at least $150,000 is required to begin the booking process.

Status: Halted. New Shepard’s last commercial flight was NS-38 on January 22, 2026. Blue Origin said that beginning January 30, 2026, New Shepard operations would be suspended “for at least two years” so the company could focus engineering resources on the Blue Moon lunar lander being developed as part of NASA’s Artemis program.

Blue Origin said it had “a multi-year backlog of customers” waiting to fly when operations resume. No restart date has been set, so other reported New Shepard flight dates should not be treated as confirmed.

Best suited to: Customers willing to join a long, currently suspended queue for the most frequently used suborbital spaceflight program in the industry.

Virgin Galactic

Paying passengers flown: Yes. Virgin Galactic operated six passenger flights aboard SpaceShipTwo, or VSS Unity, between 2023 and 2024 from Spaceport America in New Mexico. Those flights reached approximately 86 kilometers, slightly below the internationally accepted 100-kilometer boundary of space. Virgin Galactic’s official website is available at virgingalactic.com.

Price: In April 2026, Virgin Galactic reopened ticket sales at $750,000 per seat and offered a limited number of 50 tickets. The source material describes that price as down from $600,000 in 2023 and $450,000 in 2021. More than 675 people were reportedly on the waiting list when sales reopened, including customers who purchased tickets years earlier for as much as $200,000.

Chief Executive Officer Michael Colglazier said another increase was expected for the next batch of tickets.

Status: Paused. VSS Unity retired from commercial service in 2024 as Virgin Galactic prepared a new-generation Delta-class spaceplane. In its second-quarter 2026 results, released as of mid-August 2026, the company moved the first Delta-class flight from the fourth quarter of 2026 to February 2027 because of delays in avionics and systems installation. The company did not identify the root cause of those delays.

February 2027 is an operator-stated target, not a confirmed launch date. The program has already experienced multiple schedule changes.

A safety note concerns a 2014 developmental test flight. A test model built by Scaled Composites under the Virgin Galactic brand exploded during the flight, killing co-pilot Michael Alsbury. The flight was a developmental test operation, not a commercial passenger flight, and it did not use the vehicle design that later carried paying passengers.

Best suited to: Customers seeking a suborbital flight and willing to pay the highest stated suborbital price while waiting for the Delta-class program to resume.

Tier 4: Orbital and Station Missions

Axiom Space

Paid-passenger flights flown: Yes. Axiom has sent private astronauts to the International Space Station on four missions, from Ax-1 in April 2022 through Ax-4 in June-July 2025. The Ax-4 mission lasted 18 days, making it the longest Axiom mission to that point. The crews have included private astronauts and people representing the governments of Saudi Arabia, Turkey, India, Hungary and Poland.

Price: The stated price is approximately $55 million per seat. That figure has remained consistent since the first Axiom mission was announced in 2021 and was reconfirmed during the crew announcement for the upcoming Ax-1 flight.

Status: NASA awarded the Ax-5 mission with a target launch no sooner than January 2027. The mission is expected to last up to 14 days, but January 2027 is a target rather than a confirmed launch date.

In February 2026, NASA announced another private astronaut mission, PAM-6, awarded to Vast. The award could eventually broaden the market for private ISS flights beyond Axiom, which has been the primary provider in this category.

Best suited to: Customers seeking an actual astronaut-style orbital mission involving several days in space and the International Space Station.

SpaceX private missions

Paying passengers flown: SpaceX has operated two prominent private crewed missions, but neither was sold as a conventional commercial flight with individually priced seats.

Inspiration4, launched in September 2021, was a privately funded, all-civilian flight to free-flying orbit at an altitude of 585 kilometers. Entrepreneur Jared Isaacman organized and funded the mission.

Polaris Dawn, identified in the source material as a September 2024 mission, was described as reaching approximately 1,400 kilometers, the highest altitude reached by a crewed orbital spacecraft since the Apollo program, and as including the first commercial spacewalk.

Price: No price was disclosed for either mission. Both were privately funded by Isaacman rather than purchased as individual tickets.

Availability: SpaceX does not currently offer seats through a fixed public price menu. Crew Dragon is used for SpaceX’s privately organized missions and to transport Axiom crews to the International Space Station. Anyone seeking a SpaceX crewed flight would need to make a mission inquiry.

SpaceX’s flights are included here because they have been among the most prominent examples of orbital space tourism, while Axiom’s missions use SpaceX hardware. At present, SpaceX’s crewed missions are not a standard consumer product.

A Separate Category: Memorial Spaceflight

Celestis

Paying customers sent aloft: Yes, although Celestis does not carry living passengers. The company has launched 24 memorial spaceflights since its first launch in 1997, more than any other operator discussed here. It is also the only company selected by NASA to commemorate one of its scientists in this way.

Celestis does not send an entire body a full urn of ashes. Instead, it places a small, symbolic amount of cremated remains or a DNA sample in a flight-qualified capsule carried as part of a commercial or scientific satellite’s payload.

Prices: The following dated prices come from Celestis’ own website. Earth Rise, a suborbital flight that returns the remains to the family, starts at $3,495. Earth Orbit, an orbital flight in which the capsule returns and burns up during atmospheric reentry, starts at $4,995. Luna or Voyager, involving a flight to lunar orbit, the lunar surface or deep space, starts at $12,995.

Celestis has also announced Mars300, which would place a capsule into Mars orbit. The mission is priced at $24,995, requires a 10% deposit and is not scheduled to launch before 2030. It is an announced but not yet flown mission, as stated on the company’s website.

Status: Celestis is active in sales and flight operations and has an established record of completed missions. Despite that record, it is not always included in conventional space tourism lists because it does not transport passengers.

Best suited to: Families seeking a memorial service involving spaceflight at a price substantially below the cost of any passenger-carrying mission described above.

Safety and Operational Records

Each operator with an operational history has a noteworthy incident or limitation that should be described directly.

The 2014 Virgin Galactic crash test flight that killed Michael Alsbury was a developmental test flight operated by Scaled Composites. It was not a commercial passenger flight and did not use the vehicle design that eventually carried paying customers.

Blue Origin’s New Shepard program has otherwise maintained a clean record across 38 crewed flights. Its notable failure involved the uncrewed NS-23 cargo mission in September 2022, when the booster malfunctioned soon after takeoff. The abort system activated as designed, and the payload returned safely under parachute. No one was injured because there were no passengers aboard.

All of the suborbital and orbital operators discussed above require some form of pre-flight medical evaluation. None publishes safety statistics in the same manner as commercial airlines, in part because their total flight hours are measured in dozens rather than millions. For prospective customers, that limited disclosure leaves the flight counts, incident histories and test records described above as the primary public basis for comparing operators.

The Cryptocurrency Connection

Justin Sun’s August 2025 flight is the clearest connection between the cryptocurrency industry and commercial human spaceflight discussed in this review. His journey was a completed flight funded years in advance, rather than an announced plan or a reservation without a date.

The transaction also illustrates how a spaceflight auction can differ from an ordinary ticket purchase. Sun paid $28 million in 2021, but the money was not a standard fare. It was donated to Blue Origin’s Club for the Future charity. Four years passed between his winning the auction and his actual flight on New Shepard NS-34.

What Each Category Is For

There is no single best space tourism operator because the four main categories offer different products.

For people seeking true physical weightlessness without the specialized training associated with an orbital mission, Zero-G is the relevant U.S. option when its flights resume. The source material places the cost at approximately $100,000 per flight in its concluding comparison, although the detailed Zero-G pricing section lists recent packages of roughly $6,700 to $8,850.

For a high-altitude balloon journey in a pressurized capsule without weightlessness, EOS-X Space is the company to monitor while it finalizes commercial pricing, regulatory approvals and a crewed flight schedule. EOS-X Space acquired Space Perspective’s technological assets, not its corporate entity or liabilities.

For a rocket-powered suborbital experience, Blue Origin and Virgin Galactic are currently paused or suspended. Blue Origin has no announced restart date after its planned halt of at least two years. Virgin Galactic has stated a February 2027 target for its first Delta-class flight, but that target is not confirmed and follows earlier delays. Its stated ticket price is higher than Blue Origin’s known estimates, while Blue Origin has the longer current suspension.

For a genuine astronaut-style mission lasting several days, Axiom is the only operator in this review currently offering the established private-astronaut model to the International Space Station. SpaceX has flown privately organized orbital missions, but it does not sell seats from a fixed public price list.

For customers seeking a space-related memorial service rather than personal spaceflight, Celestis has completed more missions than any other company listed and offers prices far below those of passenger-carrying operators. The nearest dated milestones to watch are Axiom’s Ax-5, with a launch targeted no sooner than January 2027, and Virgin Galactic’s first Delta-class flight, targeted for February 2027 — in both cases, operator-stated targets rather than confirmed dates.

Editorial correction: An earlier version incorrectly reported that EOS-X Space acquired Space Perspective. The transaction involved only the purchase of technological assets. EOS-X Space did not acquire the corporate entity or assume its financial liabilities. References to the former entity’s financial difficulties, legacy reservations and $125,000 ticket price apply only to that former Space Perspective structure and do not describe EOS-X Space’s current business or commercial model.

Source: https://www.cryptopolitan.com/space-tourism-companies-in-2026/