analysis
The Senate Armed Services Committee recognized the stratosphere as an emerging operational domain in its FY2026 NDAA report. Urban Sky's $11.3M APFIT award funds production and fielding of a stratospheric platform — not first-time funding for the category.
analysis
The U.S. Army just renewed its tethered-aerostat surveillance program through 2031. It confirms the category is here to stay — and it draws a clean line between what legacy aerostats are for and what we are building.
analysis
A cheap drone or missile was enough to knock out a strategic radar aerostat — and it has now happened twice. The lesson isn't "build a tougher big aerostat" — it's the opposite.
UGV
Ukraine has contracted 22,000 ground robots for 2026 and is heading toward fifty thousand. Almost all run Starlink — that part is known. Our research looked at what sits underneath it.
Key takeaways TL;DR. Aerobavovna is the aerostat platform; the comms payloads come from their makers — Silvus, Persistent Systems, TrellisWare and DTC on the MANET side, Radionor's phased-array link, and L3Harris Falcon III. Lifting these radios hundreds of metres up doesn't change the band — it
analysis
Radionor rebranded CRE2 to I-BEAM. The point worth making is the antenna: phased array gives you directional gain without the pointing problem.
haps
An open-source map of HAPS alerts over Russia, aggregated from open Russian sources.
aerostats
The question is not whether this works. It's who else has done it. Three Olympics. One World Cup. One European Championship. Two papal visits with crowds in the hundreds of thousands. G8 summits. COP21. State funerals with sitting presidents. **Rio de Janeiro, FIFA World Cup 2014.** Fan Fest
aerostats
Key takeaways TL;DR. Tethered aerostats have a proven emergency-response record in three roles: communications restoration, wide-area environmental monitoring, and persistent search-and-rescue. After Hurricane Katrina, a TCOM 17M at 305 m restored a 1,550 km² cellular umbrella for 2,000 subscribers, deployable in 3 hours.
Elevated connectivity from tethered aerostats and HAPS — comms relay, RF payloads and persistent aerial links. Battle-tested in Ukraine.
After months of swarm exercises, the U.S. Army just issued its first formal procurement notice for high-altitude balloon systems.
Ukraine's Ministry of Defence has officially codified the AB12TC aerostat complex. The first purchase came in hours — paid for with eBonuses earned through confirmed combat results.
In early May 2026, the U.S. Army conducted a training exercise over the Baltic region: Micro-HABs launched from Sweden and landed in Latvia after 24–30 hours of flight at altitudes above 18,000 meters. The stated objective — validating sensors and communications relay under real operational conditions. Over
Starlink transformed battlefield communications. And then, in certain places and situations, it stopped working. Here is why — and what fills the gap.
Ukraine plans to procure 50,000 unmanned ground vehicles in 2026. Nearly all of them run on Starlink. That is a capability. It is also a dependency — and one that European armies cannot replicate at all.
Fiction has understood this for a long time. Military observation balloons appear in the earliest war games. A Ukrainian studio set in the Chornobyl Exclusion Zone put one at the center of its most critical tactical location. And an animated film imagined floating wind farms above a megacity years before
Incident 01 Shot Down by Missiles 1981 "Fat Albert" and the Lobster Fishermen of Florida 📍 Cudjoe Key, Florida, USA · August 1981 The TARS aerostat over Cudjoe Key — the one locals nicknamed "Fat Albert." Photo: U.S. Customs and Border Protection It started as a routine descent
Sceye SE2 and Kelluu both made headlines this week. Both silver, both lighter than air. But comparing them is like comparing a moped and a Boeing 747 just because both have engines.
A new class of aerial platform is emerging: small, autonomous, lighter-than-air drones. Not the giant rigid airships of the 1930s — purpose-built, technology-dense machines that can stay aloft for hours, carry sensor payloads, and operate silently in environments where conventional drones struggle. Three converging technologies are making
Key takeaways TL;DR. A free-flying drone carrying a useful payload lasts only 20–40 minutes. Both tethered drones and tethered aerostats solve this by powering the aircraft through a cable — enabling flights measured in hours or days, plus a secure, jam-resistant data link over the tether. The
Key takeaways TL;DR. Lift a relay higher and its line-of-sight footprint grows. Our interactive calculator shows radio horizon from an aerostat between 100 m and 1,500 m using the radio-horizon formula with atmospheric refraction (k=4/3) — baseline figures for omnidirectional antennas. * Interactive calculator: altitude
Just read it at Defence-blog https://defence-blog.com/ukrainian-company-brings-aerostats-back-to-modern-warfare/
