World View keeps one of its balloons at high altitude afloat for 16 days

World View Enterprises – the company that aims to lift payloads and high-altitude people with giant balloons – has kept one of its vehicles afloat for a very long time. Today, the company announced that one of its payload balloons remained at high altitude for 16 consecutive days before landing safely on Earth. This is the last step of World View's quest to keep a balloon aloft for 60 days.

The balloon vehicle World View has tested is the company's Stratollite system. The underlying idea is to create a vehicle that functions like a satellite, without the need to launch an expensive rocket into orbit. World View's stratollites are designed to float at altitudes between 50,000 and 75,000 feet, and are expected to fly over the same part of the Earth for two months at a time. From this height, regardless of the payload or instruments carried by the balloon, they can continuously collect data from the same part of the surface, similar to a high-orbiting fixed satellite.

World View has a long way to go before the capabilities promised by the Stratollite are fully realized. But the company is getting closer to its goals through a series of tests. Prior to this last test flight, World View had piloted a Stratollite only five days at a time. Then, on May 18, the company launched the latest test vehicle out of World View headquarters in Tucson, Arizona, with the goal of staying active for just two weeks. She managed to stay in place for two more days before going back down. .

In the air, the Stratollite vehicle tried different methods of holding in position, staying on the same ground for several hours at a time. "The ability to be persistent in an area of ​​interest was an important part of this flight," said Ryan Hartman, President and CEO of World View. The edge. The stratollites are designed to "sail" over the air currents, using directional winds at high altitude to stay in one place. If the wind moves the balloon too far in one direction, the vehicle will drop or increase to a different current to maintain a relatively stable position.

During the 16-day flight, World View was able to spend a total of eight days in an area approximately 75 kilometers wide. He also demonstrated a more accurate station keeping, Hartman explains, spending 55 consecutive hours in an area 100 km wide and 6.5 hours in an area of ​​just under 6 km wide.

Staying in such a small space is crucial for the Stratollite system, as this feature could prove useful for different applications for customers, according to Hartman. He notes that such a system over the Earth could be used by the military to help with certain mission operations or that the Stratollite could help monitor natural disasters such as tornadoes and hurricanes, and to help in case of disaster. "There are all kinds of very important use cases for which we can provide a station holding capability in an area as small as [6-mile] diameter area, "says Hartman.

Image: view of the world

Throughout this flight, the Stratollite traveled 3,000 kilometers before traveling to the Grand Canyon, Nevada, Oregon and Utah. Once the World View team decided to bring the Stratollite back to Earth, the company was able to land within 400 meters of a targeted area in the Nevada desert, where the vehicle was then found. World View hopes to even use some of the components of this flight during an upcoming mission.

The next important step is to keep a Stratollite for 30 days, which would bring World View even closer to opening up the system to commercial customers. This may or may not be the purpose of the next test flight, depending on what the company learns from this most recent test. "With each flight, we'll learn something that will improve the next flight a little," says Hartman. "And we will always make progress." Eventually, World View hopes to finalize the Stratollite product by the end of the year and market it by 2020.

World View is not the only company that wants to capitalize on the benefits of high altitude balloons. Google's Google Loon project also hopes to use balloons to provide Internet coverage high in the sky, saying it can keep its vehicles afloat for 100 to 200 days. World View has not explicitly stated its intention to provide Internet coverage, but the company has indicated that its customers are already subscribers and interested in the service. However, Hartman will not say which organizations are involved. "A lot of the work we do is based on what the market expects of us," says Hartman. "We are therefore eager to offer them a product and support these customers."

In addition, World View's long-term goals also include sending people, not just instruments, high up in the sky as part of a program called Voyager. But these plans are apparently on the back burner as the company focuses on stratollites. "Once we have Stratollite on the market, we will focus on our future products," says Hartman.