220815_worldview_balloon_sunset

World View personnel prepare a Stratollite balloon for flight. (World View)

WASHINGTON: Private company World View Enterprises sees an expanding market for stratospheric platforms like its Stratollite balloons, especially for providing persistent intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance (ISR) for the military services from eye-watering heights, according to CEO Ryan Hartman.

In particular, he told Breaking Defense in a recent interview that the small Tuscon-based company is “having discussions” with the Army’s Pacific command about their needs for “operationalizing the stratosphere” — that is, developing “a set of capabilities for layered ISR in their area of responsibility.”

The Army, Air Force and Navy, as well as a number of combatant commands including Central Command, have been exploring the use of lighter than air balloons and drones that can cruise in the stratosphere for a number of years. The altitude of the stratosphere’s beginning varies slightly from the equator to the poles, between six and 20 kilometers, and extends up to 50 kilometers. A key attraction lies in the fact that it’s above most of the Earth’s heavy weather but close enough to allow precise remote sensing.

RELATED: After setting ultra-endurance record, Army Zephyr drone keeps flying, whether it wants to or not

But Hartman said that those technologies that can operate that high for that long only recently have “started to mature to the point where they will be a part of force structure.”

World View’s business for this year “is about 65% defense related work, about 13% or so in other government agencies, and the rest of commercial,” he noted, but said that is likely to change over time with more commercial work.  (It also provides NASA and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Agency with research flights, and in 2024 intends to begin offering balloon rides to “near-space” for tourists after a long hiatus in its original plans.)

But the company, founded in 2013, is funded primarily by venture capital, with Hartman noting that it has “raised $115M to date with most of that led by Accel and Canaan…and we are currently raising a Series D.”

In its Pentagon work, World View at the end of last month wrapped up a Phase 2 Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) contract with the Air Force’s innovation hub AFWERX to provide a demonstration of  the Stratollite balloon’s capability to provide tactical ISR for Air Force Special Operations Command, according to contract information provided by an Air Force spokesperson.

The contracting notice described Stratollite as a “a long duration, persistent, autonomous platform …  for high resolution electro-optical (EO) and infrared (IR) imagery, and signals intelligence (SIGINT)” that is “flown remotely while navigating in the stratosphere with low detectability.”

Hartman explained that Stratollite has two unique capabilities that make it of interest to military customers: the high quality of the imagery, including full-motion video; and the ability to loiter over an area for a very long period of time.

“As an example, we’ve demonstrated staying within a 40 kilometer area — that’s a small city —staying over that area for 100 continuous hours, more than four days,” he said. “And so with that kind of capability, you’re able to do very detailed pattern of life monitoring — continuous monitoring of the movement of people, the movement of goods, where vehicles … go, what was kind of their path.”

According to the World View website, the company can provide images with a 5 centimeter-per-pixel resolution from 50,000 feet, and stay in the air for 45 days.

The balloons are really big, Hartman noted, with a volume the size of a college football stadium. But because they are made of a polyethylene plastic, do not create a high heat signature, and fly really slow, they are harder to detect with radar, electro optical and infrared sensors than one might think — and thus are not necessarily giant targets in the sky.

“I’ll just leave it to say that there are there are unique attributes around the Stratollite that protects it in its ability to operate in the stratosphere,” he said.

A Stratollite can fly up to about 95,000 ft. (around 29 km), according to World View’s website, and currently “offer 250W of power and a payload capacity of 50kg.” But Hartman said the payload capacity really only depends on the size of the balloon, and thus can be increased to fit a customer’s desires.

“We designed the balloons specifically around the amount of weight that we’re going to carry,” he said. “The typical package of the what we call the ‘Stratacraft’ that has all of our avionics, communication systems or sensors and all of that weighs several thousand pounds, and that’s a kind of a general kind of baseline.”

The balloons also are designed to withstand extreme heat that can occur in the stratosphere, with “a ballast system that can subtract or add air (weight) to the balloon, and an additional helium release system,” a company representative said in an email. “These are mainly backup systems if needed.”