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All disclosed financing of tethered aerostat, stratospheric balloon and airship companies over ten years adds up to $1.03B — less than half of one Anduril round. Tethered aerostats received 7%.
analysis
Outside our usual topic, but asked often in Ukraine right now: could tethered aerostats with a net protect a bridge from Shahed-type drones? First-order estimates for Kyiv's Southern Bridge.
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A Polish tethered aerostat carrying a passive radar was trialled at an army field exercise in September. Its developers position it as a complement to the Barbara aerostat programme.
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Six weeks after the ground facility was burnt out, an IRGC drone and missile attack took the U.S. TARS over Erbil out of the air. Two hits on one fixed site.
haps
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.
analysis
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.
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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.