Sure, Spain's national soccer team will reach new heights Sunday if it can snatch its first-ever World Cup title with a win over the Netherlands, but it'll still be hard-pressed to beat what one Spanish startup did this week.
As a participant in the 14th annual European Balloon Festival, zero2infinity, a Barcelona-based space tourism outfit, affixed the number 7 jersey of striker David Villa to the company's nano-bloon and let her fly more than 108,000 feet in the atmosphere before capturing the image above.
"We had some extra payload capability," zero2infinity founder and CEO José Mariano López-Urdiales told Playbook. "I thought that it was worth it. We are all about elevating experiences, in the physical and emotional senses. We think that La Furia Roja elevated our country emotionally, so we wanted to correspond to it physically."
As the 40-feet-wide, helium-filled balloon lifted higher and higher, an on-board video camera recorded the scene at varying altitudes:
The entire flight lasted around three hours before the balloon – and jersey – parachuted back down to Earth. López-Urdiales isn't sure what he might attempt next if Spain does pull off the victory Sunday in Johannesburg, South Africa, but looking skyward toward the Iberian Peninsula might not be a bad bet.
