Navigable High Altitude Balloons

[Belal Sayed]

Hi all. I wish to know if anyone here is aware of any company/team working/manufactures high altitude balloons which can be navigated in terms of altitude and location? Something similar to the Google Loon balloons.

[David Johnson]

Hi,

b2-space.com are working towards a solution similar to Google Loon on some of their flights.

73

Dave, G4DPZ

(Principal RF Engineer, B2Space)

[Joe]

Been there done that.
https://www.qsl.net/nss/earthbreeze.html

Joe WB9SBD / KB9KHO

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[Ed Moore]

I don't think this is quite the same thing - I cannot see anything on your webpage that suggests active altitude control and autonomous planning strategies to allow any form of controllable navigation, like Belal asked about.

What you made is a sort of deconstructed super-pressure balloon or inverted ballonet that found an equilibrium altitude passively. Complete circumnavigations of the earth have been achieved several times by amateurs with these passive methods, but it is not the same thing as what Loon was trying to achieve, where a balloon could intentionally vary its altitude to catch a specific wind in order to fly somewhere, station keep, or whatever. I'm not even sure that Loon ever achieved arbitrarily positioning ability, but I think they managed to at least keep the 'constellation' well-spaced and distributed with active techniques.

If Dan Bowen still monitors this list he may be able to chip in.

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[Joe]

yeah,
the only difference is they have an air compressor onboard.

want to go up let some air out,
 go down put some air in.

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[Matthew Patrick]

Tethered superpressure balloons have been known in the literature for some time.

I’m working on a project with the University of Calgary to build a venting apparatus that allows latex weather balloons to float at an arbitrary altitude and then descend, but without some kind of ballast release this won’t satisfy the navigation requirements of the original question.

There was a successful attempt by a team at Stanford to do this before:

https://stanfordasl.github.io/wp-content/papercite-data/pdf/Suskho.Tedjarati.ea.AERO2017.pdf

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