Zero 2 Infinity

Zero 2 Infinity flew balloons to the edge of space from Barcelona. Its Elevate service lifted payloads, instruments and once a small spacecraft mock-up into the stratosphere, twenty-something kilometres up, where the sky is black and the pressure nearly gone, for testing, imagery and advertising. Bloostar, the more radical idea, was a rocket launched from a balloon at altitude, skipping the thickest atmosphere and with it much of a conventional first stage.

The reasoning was sound and the market never arrived at the size the plan needed. Balloon launch spends nothing fighting drag, needs no launch pad, and can rise from a field, so a small satellite could in principle reach orbit from a rockoon far more cheaply. Subscale tests flew, including an engine firing from the stratosphere, but the funding to scale Bloostar to orbit never closed.

The record goes quiet after 2019, and the end came formally in May 2026, when the company entered voluntary insolvency proceedings at a Barcelona commercial court. No trade press covered it; the filing sits in the Spanish registry. The balloons worked, the rocket stayed subscale, and the company that wanted to reach space slowly ran out of the means to keep trying.