In 2009 Jose Mariano Lopez-Urdiales founded Zero2Infinity in Barcelona, Spain; its maiden vehicle is bloon, a stratospheric balloon that will allow people to fly to Near-Space. Thanks to his astronomer father, he has been in close contact with space missions ever since he was a child. He graduated in Aeronautical Engineering from Universidad Politécnica de Madrid, and since then has been involved in a host of cutting-edge projects such as building and flying microgravity payloads for the European Space Agency, rocket science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the Ariane 5 Evolution Space launcher, to name a few.
The Q&A is now closed. Thanks everyone for participating! open today, July 11th from 1-2pm US EST (5pm-6pm GMT; 12am-1am Bangkok). Scroll down or click here to submit your questions below!
I first met Jose in 2011 when he gave a talk about bloon at a conference on space tourism and interviewed him about near-future space tourism later that year. Today, he’ll be here for one hour to answer your questions about how you can become a space tourist, the costs, challenges, and what’s next for tourism far beyond the stars, all in the comments section below.