You pretty much can take a balloon to space. You'll pretty soon fall back to Earth though, as you'll be nowhere near orbital velocity. Getting to space is easy

You pretty much can take a balloon to space. You'll pretty soon fall back to Earth though, as you'll be nowhere near orbital velocity. Getting to space is easy. Staying there is hard. For example, if the ISS passed directly overhead of you, it's only 250 miles away. I've driven three times that in a day. The trick of the whole thing is that while it's only 250 miles away vertically, it's moving at 4.7 miles per second laterally. It goes around the Earth (roughly 25,000 miles) in 90 minutes. It's going to be hard to get your balloon to those kinds of speeds.