World Balloon News #25
April 25th, 2024
GUSTO telescope finally lands in Antarctica • First balloon missions of the year by World View • Aerostar: NSC acquisition and Thunderhead flights • A busy summer for ESRANGE with NASA and CNES balloon campaigns • Chinese balloons back in the news, this time for real • In brief: SuperBIT, Iwaya, NASA Flight Opportunities, SCopEX, Balomania.
Hello world.
Those who know me know that I don't like to talk much about myself personally, but at the same time, I like that my followers and the readers of this humble and irregular newsletter know the reasons behind some delays. Many times much larger than expected.
The last few months have been quite hard, and have greatly affected the regular edition of World Balloon News, as well as my usual participation in Mastodon. For those who want to know the reason for this, at the bottom end of this edition, I give you a brief summary.
For those who do not want or are not interested in knowing, read and enjoy this new issue of your favorite newsletter and when you reach the end of the In Brief section, ignore the rest. No problem.
As usual, enjoy and if you like it, share.
GUSTO telescope finally lands in Antarctica
The main balloon mission of the 2023/2024 NASA balloon launch campaign in Antarctica finally came to an end in late February. Not only was it a bit shorter than initially expected but also had a finale very different than planned. But first, let’s remember what the mission was about.
The GUSTO telescope (an acronym for Galactic/Extragalactic ULDB Spectroscopic Terahertz Observatory) is an instrument equipped with very sensitive detectors to measure emission lines for carbon, oxygen, and nitrogen in the terahertz domain of the spectrum. Its main goal is to obtain a deep insight into the full lifecycle of the interstellar medium which is the cosmic material found between stars.
The complex experiment was born on the heritage of previous balloon-borne instruments, mainly the STO or Stratospheric Terahertz Observatory. The collaboration behind the initiative includes Johns Hopkins University providing the gondola, the University of Arizona which is responsible for the telescope and instrument which incorporated detection technologies developed by NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Arizona State University, and SRON Institute for Space Research from the Netherlands.
The balloon flight launched on December 31, performed two complete turns to the south pole without altering the typical route followed by the NASA balloons launched in the austral summer. However, during the third turn, the balloon started to follow a more erratic flight pattern consistent with the breaking of the circular pattern of the polar vortex and also with the increasingly pronounced changes in altitude that the balloon experienced when the sun began to gradually settle lower and lower on the horizon.
Finally, the mission was terminated on February 26, and the payload landed 300 miles South of Mawson Research Station. GUSTO established a new record for a NASA heavy-lift, long-duration balloon mission remaining aloft for 57 days, 7 hours, and 38 minutes.
What was originally planned to be a “throwaway” mission on which GUSTO would end at the bottom of the ocean surrounding Antarctica, finally ended in a conventional landing that will force the agency to recover the payload, parachute and balloon in the upcoming season. ¿Why?
There is not a single answer but a series of factors that contributed to this end:
The late launch date. Original plans called for a launch during the first days of December. If that condition had been met, most of the flight of GUSTO would have happened floating along a very stable polar vortex which would have slowly taken the balloon and its cargo off the continent as we can see in the image below on the left, and by the time the darkness arrived and the subsequent progressive loss of altitude, the balloon would already be flying over the Ocean. Instead, the full month of delay contributed to the deterioration of the vortex when the balloon was still over the white continent.
The change of balloon. GUSTO was meant to fly under a super-pressure balloon but was finally launched under a zero-pressure balloon. The advantage of the first is that it maintains a constant level and is less susceptible to altitude changes due to the cooling or overheating of the gas inside the envelope. During the summer, in Antarctica, the balloon receives 24 hours of solar radiation and thus the factor is negligible. That’s why you can achieve almost two months of flying using a conventional zero-pressure balloon. But (always is a “but”) due to the late launching date, during the last weeks of flight, the balloon started to experience big altitude changes, because the Sun started to set under the horizon during some periods. If the balloon transporting the telescope had not been changed, there is a slight chance that the altitude fluctuations wouldn't have been so ample and the flight could have endured a lot more.
If you are asking about the data obtained during the flight, it was secured by a combination of LOS downloads when the balloon passed close to McMurdo and a very reliable satellite connection using the Starlink system of Space-X.
Then, ¿why NASA and the US Antarctic program must recover a payload originally planned to be lost? Because have to. The Antarctic treaty is very clear regarding the contamination of the white continent and the final disposal of the "waste" of any scientific activity carried out there. Ballooning is not the exception.
After recovery, plans are to reuse some parts in future missions or to transport the instrument or elements of it to a museum.
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First two balloon missions of the year by World View
The Tucson-based balloon firm World View performed during late February and early March, the first two balloon missions of their 2024 schedule.
The first one took place on February 23. The zero-pressure balloon was launched from Space Port Tucson -the main launch facility of the firm- and endured a little more than four hours in flight before landing near the ghost town of Dos Cabezas, Arizona 123 km east of the launch site. Although there is no information regarding the payload, I know that the mission was dubbed MANTIS-1 and used a "Tycho" class flight system. The objective of the flight was to serve as a demonstration mission with the customer as part of an ongoing effort to develop some specialized civil-use-case sensors for future use aboard World View’s Stratollites.
The second mission -also launched from Tucson- was performed on March 9, but this time the vehicle was a Variable Altitude Air Ballast Balloon System (VAABBS) better known by its trademark of Stratollite. The mission started early in the morning and it certainly did not go unnoticed by many residents of the surrounding area who began to report the strange presence of the double balloon in the clear Arizona sky.
The same occurred in several towns and cities along the balloon’s flight path both in Arizona and New Mexico.
The mission endured about 55 hours and the balloon and its payload landed in the Texas Panhandle on March 11. No details were disclosed by the company regarding the nature or objective of the flight.
In other news, World View announced the following week the opening and initial funding of a Series D round. The investment round was led by Sierra Nevada Corp. and builds upon the multi-year strategic partnership initiated between the two companies in 2022.
According to the press release, "...the Series D raise in funding specifically supports the increasing demand for high-altitude intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance (ISR) capabilities identified by the U.S. Army, U.S. Air Force, U.S. Department of Defense, and global defense forces, as well as growing demand for commercial remote sensing solutions. With this combined strategic investment, World View is poised to execute a robust flight manifest over the next 24 months, further developing and improving its flight systems and capabilities..."
Aerostar: NSC acquisition and Thunderhead flights
Before making the usual account of the launch activities of Aerostar the South Dakota-based balloon firm and one of the most active private balloon companies in the field, I must highlight a piece of news that has caused a surprise in the ballooning circles: the acquisition of Near Space Corporation (NSC) a company based on Tillamook, Oregon which lead for decades the activity on the west coast of the United States.
The deal was announced on March 25 by Aerostar and TCOM. We must remember that the former is part of the latter’s portfolio of aerospace and defense companies.
The acquisition represents for Aerostar the incorporation of an important asset in terms of a consolidated presence on the West Coast of the United States. NSC operates the Johnson Near Space Center located in Tillamook, Oregon and manages the Tillamook Unmanned Aircraft Systems (UAS) Test Range, one of seven FAA-designated UAS Testing locations in the United States.
Initially founded as GSSL Inc. in 1996 to provide launch, tracking, and recovery services of small and medium-sized balloons, the focus of the company was independent users, universities, and government agencies unable to afford the costs and requirements of larger balloon programs like the ones of NASA or the Air Force.
NSC operates also from Madras (OR), Hawaii, and in Spaceport America (NM), taking part in important launch campaigns including the testing of the parachute systems for Boeing’s Starliner capsule, the drop test as part of the qualification phase of the parachute system for the ExoMars mission, and more recently the test of a prototype balloon for Venus.
Now let’s see what happened with Aerostar launches since the last edition of this bulletin.
In the period under analysis, the company performed several balloon flights with its own long-duration super-pressure balloon system known as the Thunderhead.
In February I mentioned a mission, HBAL673, which at the time of the closing of the last edition began to transit over the Atlantic Ocean after crossing over Myrtle Beach on a date close to the first anniversary of the incident with the Chinese spy balloon. That balloon continued the “classic” route of many previous flights across the Caribbean Sea and Central America to ending flying over the Pacific Ocean. By February 26, the balloon appeared close to the Hawaiian Islands where it maintained a very intense overflying pattern across the entire archipelago during the following two weeks as we can see in the map below.
The last known position before going off the grid again was recorded on March 4, 200 miles SE of the Big Island. At the time of writing this, I can’t confirm if it is still flying.
The first new launch of the period I’m covering occurred on February 21. Mission HBAL675 was launched from the Aerostar flight facility located in a small airfield near Hurley (SD). The balloon remained aloft for 29 hours before landing in Southwest Illinois.
After that, the company activity moved to Nevada with two balloon launches performed the same day from Silver Springs Airport. As far as I know, this is the first time that Aerostar has used that remote spot as an operative base. The two Thunderheads (HBAL678 and N251TH) performed a six-day-long mission following a route very close to each other before landing in South Dakota. Besides the fact that the firm rarely publishes information regarding the flights, I’ve tried to speculate why they chose that specific spot.
Many times in the past, they launched their balloons in remote locations or even open fields apparently searching for a location that could make it easier to overflight a desired area without wasting time and resources to maneuver during days to reach the spot. In the case of the two flights I’m analyzing here I reconstructed the flight paths and merged them in a single map to search for any clue. After some careful observation, I’ve located an interesting moment in the flight on March 1, on which both balloons were flying above Dugway Proving Grounds a U.S. Army facility established in 1942 to test biological and chemical weapons located in Utah. They were over the restricted space of the facility for some time, and the previous route seems to suggest some maneuvers to allow both balloons to be over the area simultaneously.
Interesting, isn’t it?
During the remainder of March and the first half of April, the company launched five more Thunderhead missions: two on March 28 and March 29 from Santa Fe County in New Mexico and the rest on April 4, April 5, and April 12 from Hurley in South Dakota. While most missions endured less than a day aloft, two of them HBAL 676 and HBAL 681 made their way to the Atlantic Ocean and were lost of sight after 6 days aloft near Bermuda. The former was part of an outreach activity by the company in which live images were transmitted via Aerostar’s YouTube channel.
Near the closing of this edition, a last Thunderhead balloon was launched by the firm from Indiantown Airport, a small airfield in Florida that in 2023 also served as the launch site for another Thunderhead mission.
The balloon with callsign HBAL 684 was launched on April 22 and almost immediately started a course over the Atlantic. The last activity reported was a series of maneuvers NE of the Bahamas.
In case you are new to this newsletter, you can find detailed information on almost every scientific, commercial, and military balloon flight performed around the world since 1947 by visiting StratoCat, the first and only website devoted to documenting the use of stratospheric balloons during the last 70 years.
A busy summer for ESRANGE with NASA and CNES balloon campaigns
This summer, the balloon base of ESRANGE located near Kiruna, Sweden will host a very intense activity as far as scientific ballooning is concerned. Two campaigns by NASA and CNES will take place performing local flights and also Transatlantic ones from Sweden to Canada.
The French campaign denominated TRANSAT 2024 will perform three flights: the main one which gives its name to the campaign will be the first time on which CNES will attempt a long-duration flight from Esrange across the Ocean using a zero-pressure balloon model 803Z with a volume of 800.000 cubic meters.
Two other missions Atmosfer and Sapheraller will be short-duration local flights and will made use of much smaller balloons of 150.000 and 100.000 cubic meters respectively.
All missions will carry onboard several experiments on different disciplines.
The pre-campaign effort started in February, at the French base of Aire Sur L’Adour where the Balloon Operations team rehearsed launch procedures with great coverage by the local French media with articles appearing for example on Francebleu, La Depeche, Les Annonces Landaises, or La Republique des Pyrenees to name a few.
The CNES team is planning to arrive at ESRANGE during the first days of June, while in May a team will be deployed to Greenland to set up the relay station to be used during the TRANSAT mission.
The French campaign was originally planned to include a fourth mission: the first in-flight test of BALMAN the new steerable balloon being developed for CNES by Hemeria. However, some issues with the design forced to postpone the first test flight further.
On the NASA side, the Columbia Scientific Balloon Facility will be in charge of the launch, tracking, and recovery of four transatlantic missions. Although the launch window is the same for both campaigns (mid-June to mid-July approx.), the scientific teams taking part in the NASA campaign arrived in early April to ESRANGE and started the process of integration of their much more complex instruments.
The planned missions are in brief:
The SUNRISE solar telescope
HELIX, a magnet spectrometer to study cosmic rays
BOOMS, an instrument to observe flashes of X-ray light, and
XL-CALIBUR, a telescope aimed to measure polarization at hard X-ray wavelengths
The BOOMS mission will serve also as qualification flight for the BIG-60 balloon, which was planned to be tested this year from Antarctica but was dropped from the list.
The next issue of this bulletin will be full of details on both campaigns. Stay tuned!
Chinese balloons are back in the news, this time for real
Since the infamous incident of the Chinese Spy Balloon shoot down on the eastern coast of the United States in February 2023, we had several “comebacks” of the matter. Sometimes interesting data surfaces on the findings of the agencies inspecting the debris, in other cases is just a certain paranoia and suspicion that has remained in public opinion (in my case I must deny on social networks almost weekly the Chinese origin of each balloon that appears in the best-known airplane tracking apps), or perhaps it is the now excessive sensitivity of the North American defense systems that seem to react to the slightest indication of the presence of any flying object, even if it is a harmless amateur radio balloon, as occurred in last February over Utah. However, a week after the false alarm, the Chinese Spy Balloon thing made a glorious comeback and this time for real.
So far, what was found in Alaska waters by an unnamed fishing vessel, is so far, what most clearly resembles what US authorities recovered from the waters of the Atlantic Ocean off the coast of South Carolina in 2023.
Through two videos published by one of the members of the crew of the ship on his Tik-Tok account, we could see firsthand the recovery from the sea and the unloading back in the port of a large balloon yellowish in color (probably due to the long exposure to the marine environment) and a series of cables and plastic tubing and other debris, that resembles very much to the remains of the balloon shootdown off the US east coast a little more than a year ago.
Above these lines, we can see the huge balloon fabric while being hauled aboard the fishing vessel. The next two captures show what can be a mounting plate similar to the one seen in the pictures taken by the U-2 plane that met in flight the 2023 Chinese Spy Balloon when over Missouri, and were revealed by the Washington Post as part of the Discord leaks.
Below these lines, we can see some crew members of the vessel examining the recovered remains of what appear to be ropes or cables, electronic plates, plastic tubes, and (attention to the left hand of the man in the first image) a plastic propeller, similar to the ones seen in the various sightings of the Chinese balloons around the world, including the one shot down in Myrtle Beach by an F-22 Raptor.
At the request of the authorities, the recovered balloon and the rest of the elements found related to it were unloaded onto a flatbed truck at Dutch Harbor, Alaska to be later transported to the nearby Tom Madsen Airport where military personnel loaded them in a Coast Guard Hercules C-130 plane back to the United States.
Subsequent statements from various official sources in the Pentagon and the Department of Defense referred to the balloon as an “item of national interest.”
You don’t need to wait for the next issue of World Balloon News to know what’s happening right now in the field of scientific and commercial ballooning. I publish last-minute news as well as historical pictures and other content in Mastodon, the free, self-regulated, social media network in the Fediverse.
In Brief
The superBIT telescope gained the cover of the Nature Astronomy magazine in February and a feature article called “Forty days and forty-five nights at space's edge” which contains a very detailed resume of the goals and preliminary results of the instrument. The good news -aside from putting scientific ballooning on the cover of an important scientific magazine- is that we have a successor in the making “…funding has already been secured for the 1.4 m GigaBIT telescope, which will improve on SuperBIT’s sensitivity and resolution…”. It’s good to remember that the telescope was damaged beyond repair at the end of its flight in the Argentinian Patagonia. A week later, SuperBIT also was the main topic of an extensive article published in The Conversation.
On March 4th, NASA announced the new contracts awarded to commercial flight providers for 2024. These flights include suborbital rocket-powered vehicles, high-altitude balloons, and orbital platforms that can host payloads for testing different technologies. On the balloon side, the only addition this year is the incorporation of Angstrom Designs Inc. a company that specializes in calibrating solar cells using small neoprene balloons, among other tasks. As occurred in previous years also World View, Aerostar, and Near Space Corp. (now part of Aerostar) will be providing balloon platforms for NASA. The missions will be managed by the Flight Opportunities program, in collaboration with the Small Spacecraft Technology program, both part of the agency's Space Technology Mission Directorate.
On March 10, 2024, Iwatani Giken Co. performed a new low-altitude manned balloon test over Hokkaido. The main purpose was to train pilots to operate an improved version of the two-seat T-10 Earther capsule increased in size. The firm is developing this system to transport passengers to the stratosphere in the near future. A short video of the test is available on the company's YouTube channel (below). A second test -this time with only one crew on board- was held on April 4.
The publication of the final report on March 18, 2024 by the Independent Advisory Committee that was in charge of overseeing the SCoPEx balloon project, has been the nail in the coffin of the controversial geoengineering experiment in the stratosphere aimed to study the possibility to counteract global warming by spraying tiny particles in the atmosphere that could scatter sunlight. While I prepared a brief resume of the main aspects of the report, I decided to abandon my task after reading the excellent article by James Temple in MIT Technology Review which I strongly recommend reading instead. Another must on the topic is the piece by Jeff Tolleffson published by Nature a few days later.
As controversial as it is dangerous, the subculture of the so-called "Baloeiros" in Brazil has its own documentary called BALOMANIA. These gigantic homemade paper and fabric balloons, propelled by hot air and often containing fireworks inside, have proven more than once not only to be a danger to aviation but to the population itself since their uncontrolled landing often causes fires. The film directed by Danish-Spanish filmmaker Sissel Morell Dargis is a co-production between Polar Star Films and House of Real and was produced by Jesper Jack & Marie Schmidt Olesen. It was premiered as part of the DOX:AWARD competition at this year's Copenhagen International Documentary Film Festival in Denmark. Below these lines you can see the official trailer.
Thanks for your interest.
As said above, the last few months have been quite hard as I am somewhat reinventing myself, since I was fired from my job after 36 years. It was a very unexpected blow in my life, but little by little I am trying to recover. By the way, the economic context of the country where I live - Argentina - does little to alleviate my situation.
Maintaining this publication as well as the website, and publishing new information every week, is a great effort in this new reality but helps me a lot to maintain my work routine, even in the context of no longer having a job.
However, the combination of the lack of income added to the recent changes in government that have proceeded to open many prices in the economy that were artificially "frozen" by the previous administration, have skyrocketed the operation and maintenance costs of my project. The values of both the space on the server and the cost of Internet access have almost tripled, which is why now more than ever any regular contribution, no matter how small, will be of great help for the continuity of a unique initiative like StratoCat.
I count on you.
That’s all folks for this… week, month, whatever. See you soon, and remember, if you like the contents of this humble newsletter, please share it with those who could be interested and help me to widen the audience.