Weekly Balloon News #15
May 3rd., 2023
Recent balloon launches and landings
Very little activity over the past few days in terms of balloon launches.
Aborted test by B2Space in the Canary Islands
As I pointed out in the last issue of this bulletin, the planned test of a payload for Startical, to be performed by the UK-based balloon and satellite firm B2Space from the Canary Islands was finally canceled.
The very concise statement says:
“…B2Space had scheduled a launch last week from the Canary Islands, which unfortunately did not go ahead due to the weather conditions. The teams and systems were ready, but unfortunately the wind was too strong in the operational area and therefore the launch was aborted…”
The tiny note was accompanied by a photograph showing the balloon partially inflated in what appears to be the helicopter deck of some ship, confirming my speculations about the image used to illustrate the press release announcing the test (later withdrawn) on the company's website that showed the Spanish navy ship "Rayo" during a similar test in 2022.
No information was provided by the firm about a new launch attempt.
Latest news from NASA balloon launch campaign in Wanaka
NASA’s Super Pressure Balloon launched on April 15 from Wanaka, New Zealand is completing its second tour around the world in a few more days with a more than outstanding performance. It maintains a constant altitude of between 107 and 108 thousand feet and sometimes moves at speeds as high as 130 knots.
The only land that the balloon crossed since launch was the south american continent. The first pass was during the night on April 20 / 21 and the second was on the afternoon of April 28. Sadly, the weather made its visibility from the ground difficult as the area was cloud-covered.
The mission made a lot of headlines in the press after some incredible astronomical images were published as a sample of the work that the Super-BIT telescope is making during the flight. The image at right even was featured on Astronomy Picture of the Day
The stadium-sized 18 million cubic feet Super Pressure Balloon (and not the “super balloon” as pointed out by some uneducated journalism) was manufactured by Aerostar in its plant in Sulphur Springs, Texas, is 493 feet long, weighs over 5,000 pounds, and took about 3 months to make.
A similar balloon will be used for the second mission devoted to launching an instrument called EUSO-SPB2 which is the acronym for Extreme Universe Space Observatory on a Super-Pressure Balloon, second generation.
Although the first attempt to launch the second mission was planned for May 2 (New Zealand time), the local press published a few hours ago that NASA moved the launch window based on “public safety concerns” to the end of the first week of May.
What’s on in the field
Project HIBAL book available online
In the past edition of this newsletter, I mentioned the publication online of a fantastic book written by Steven Thorn called “Project HIBAL”. The title speaks for itself: it refers to the shared American/Australian program to sample the upper atmosphere for atomic fallout using stratospheric balloons based at the Australian airport of Mildura during the 1960s and 1970s.
The 176 pages book -published on May 2021- is listed on Amazon to buy and is now also available online for free reading through the Trove Project on the website of the National Library of Australia.
The book's great value is that it offers a first-person view of the day-to-day life of the project since its author was one of its members for many years. The level of detail in the story ranges from technical details regarding the communications systems and the various modifications introduced over the years -the author was an electronics specialist- to the vehicles used, the launch procedures, the long days of search and rescue of the sampling systems carried by the balloons and the various political aspects involved in carrying out such a complex initiative.
Recovery of sampling instruments was vital to secure the samples obtained during the flight for shipment to US labs. In this regard, the book describes in detail many very entertaining and difficult rescue stories where payload recovery teams faced difficult terrain and a hostile environment made up of hundreds of miles of desert to reach the priced cargo. As proof of this, the author says that all the recovery teams had special tools to cut the wire of the fences, since many times the payloads fell in remote corners of huge farms or cattle stations that were difficult to access. Likewise, they had everything necessary to repair those same fences -even transporting rolls of wire for this purpose- once the task was finished.
In resume, the book offers a great view into a little-known part of ballooning history at the peak of the cold war.
Aftermaths of the Chinese balloon incident
A long time has passed since the Hollywoodesque closing act of the Chinese balloon incident in Myrtle Beach, but still, some new relevant data has seen the light since I published my views of the event in this same newsletter.
A few days after the Chinese balloon event I started my survey of public satellite imagery of the Hainan Island looking for traces of any kind of facility that could be the launch site of the infamous craft. A few hours later I located a big circular paved area that showed some promise and published it on Twitter.
However, after some more research, I concluded that the central device in the paved area probably was the mooring station of a tethered blimp used as a remote sensing post as was the case with the site in old pictures and as occurs with similar sites in the US so it’s very unlikely that this could be the launch site. So in conclusion, there is still no certain clue from which facility on the island it was launched.
In early April the U.S. media like CNN and NBC citing sources familiar with intel operations affirmed that the Chinese spy balloon was able to capture imagery and collect some signals intelligence from targets and then transmit that information back to Beijing in real-time. An important part of the publications was the confirmation that knowing the balloon’s path, the USAF jammed some signals from sensitive sites on US soil before the balloon was able to pick them up, hence the shadowing presence of the RC-135V/W SIGINT plane following it when it crossed US soil in February. Regarding the study of the remains by the FBI the sources pointed out that they have been able to solve how the device worked, including the algorithms used for the balloon's software and how it was powered and designed.
A very interesting point was the affirmation that "...China was able to control the balloon so it could make multiple passes over some of the sites (at times flying figure-eight formations)..." which automatically reminded me of a well-known navigational technique used by the balloons of Project Loon.
In an article published in 2019, Loon engineers shared some of the navigational capabilities of the algorithms they developed which assumed “clever and complex navigational behaviors” that were not programmed by human engineers. Among those maneuvers was the “Eight Pattern”
“The very first time we tested our ability to stay in one place using our new automated algorithm, the balloon immediately began flying an unexpected pattern. Rather than circle the area, the balloon flew in a figure 8 pattern. And not just once, it did it all day.”
Is highly probable that Chinese engineers were well aware of this -ballooning is a relatively small community- and thus developed their version of the navigational algorithm to use in their surveillance platform.
That same week, The New York Times published a detailed study of the balloon path using images obtained from satellites by Syntethaic, a company that applies AI to interpret and search features in satellite data. Reconstructing the flight path backward they were able to locate the balloon in images obtained on January 15 off Hainan Island just after launch. By analyzing the entire behavior of the balloon along the successive detections, expert Rodger Farley (a former NASA engineer that back in February published a detailed report on the Chinese Balloon, on which mostly I based my article) affirmed that the balloon showed some altitude control capabilities aimed to steer the balloon and that those abilities appear to be sharply reduced or gone after entering US territory. A possible explanation for this is that the jamming of the balloon by the USAF prevented remote control of it from China.
The reconstructed path of the Chinese balloon as mapped by Synthetaic’s RAIC product using Planet Labs PBC data. (Courtesy of Synthetaic) On April 14 an unexpected derivation from the resounding case of the 2023 Pentagon document leaks affair shed some light on previous incidents with similar Chinese balloons like the one downed off the South Carolina coast in February. The Washington Post published an article based on documents obtained by the newspaper from a trove of images of classified files posted on Discord, a group chat service popular with gamers.
The more relevant balloon data of the article:The previous incidents occurred in 2021 and 2022. U.S. analysts code-named the balloons in alphabetical order after notorious criminals followed by the last two digits of the year of the incident.
Bulger-21 carried sophisticated surveillance equipment and circumnavigated the globe from December 2021 until May 2022. This balloon was directly connected to Eagles Men Aviation Science and Technology Group, one of six Chinese companies sanctioned by the US in February.
Accardo-21 carried similar equipment to Bulger-21 as well as a “foil-lined gimbaled” sensor.
Killeen-23 (the Chinese balloon downed) had a very strange structure at the apex of the balloon. That same structure appears to be the one recovered in one of the photos taken during the debris recovery in the Atlantic. The evidence based on the power generation capabilities points out to a payload composed of a Synthetic Aperture Radar as many experts already said.
After these pieces of information went public, expert Rodger Farley a former NASA engineer that back in February published a detailed report on the Chinese Balloon, incorporated all that new information in a new revision (the 15th) of his fantastic work.
The document is freely available on the Farley Aerospace website
Merely a few hours before the publication of this edition, CNN presented exclusive images of an airship outside the hangar at the well-known east Korla site.
The images that were obtained by US satellite imaging company BlackSky show a small airship in the long strip of the Korla site. To be honest, either I'm missing something very obvious that I'm not seeing in the news, or these images don't add anything to what has already been known for several years: that there is a military complex that belongs to the Chinese People's Liberation Army and that the gigantic hangar serves as a shelter for various models of airships.Last, but not least, a few hours later NBC News announced that the presence of another balloon of unknown origin was detected nearby Hawaii and moving towards Mexico while being tracked by the US military. According to the publications a Department of Defense spokesperson said in a statement that the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) and the Defense Department first saw the unmanned balloon on April 28 at about 36,000 feet. The spokesperson said that the U.S. does not know who owns the balloon, but that there is nothing to suggest it is being handled by a “foreign or adversarial actor.”
A detailed account of what could be an interception attempt by USAF F-22 planes off Hawaii was published that same evening on The Drive.Connected or not with this incident, a few hours before closing this edition, my good friend Gonzalo Blasco shared with me a message that began to circulate on May 1st, 2023 among commercial pilots flying over Mexico through the ACARS messaging system. The message warned of military activity between 34.000 and 36.000 feet in search of an unknown object.
Good morning, CTA informs us that there is a restriction between FL340-FL360 due to military activities in search of an unidentified object in Mexican territory. At present, NOTAMs have not been issued, they only inform us to adhere to CTA instructions according to authorized FL. We are waiting for more information.
That’s all folks, see you in seven (or fourteen) days with another issue of this humble newsletter.
Another great edition - Thank you Stratocat!
Thank you Phil!