haps
Exercise Cold Raptor: Micro-HAB Launches from Powidz, Poland
Details of the U.S. Army's July 2026 micro high-altitude balloon exercise in Poland: unit, altitudes, payloads, recovery, airspace coordination, and the prior launches it built on.
Iurii Vysoven
analysis
Tracking the russian starlink (rassvet) satellite constellation over Ukraine
Rassvet is Bureau 1440's Starlink-analogue LEO constellation. We built a tool that forecasts and maps its windows of geometric visibility over Ukraine, up to 72 hours ahead — geometry, not traffic.
analysis
The Stratosphere as an Operational Domain: SASC Language and Urban Sky's APFIT Award
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 Keeps Buying Surveillance Aerostats. We're Building Connectivity for Contested Areas.
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
Big Radar Aerostats Have Become Too Easy to Kill
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
The Second Link: What Ukraine's Ground Robots Use When Starlink Isn't Enough
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.
The payload RF spectrum — what we lift on our aerostats
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's CRE2 Is Now I-BEAM
Radionor rebranded CRE2 to I-BEAM. The point worth making is the antenna: phased array gives you directional gain without the pointing problem.
haps
HAPS Missions into Russia: 77 Alerts, Mapped
An open-source map of HAPS alerts over Russia, aggregated from open Russian sources.
aerostats
Aerostats at Mass Events: What the Operational Record Actually Shows
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
Tethered Aerostats in Emergency Response: Operational Cases
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.
News
From Experiment to Procurement: The U.S. Army Issues Its First Balloon Acquisition Notice
After months of swarm exercises, the U.S. Army just issued its first formal procurement notice for high-altitude balloon systems.