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.
aerostats
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.
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
Codified. First Purchase Came in Hours.
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.
haps
HAPS over the Baltic — and this is not an isolated case
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
Connectivity
The Starlink Gap: Why Every Army Needs a Layer Between Satellites and the Ground
Starlink transformed battlefield communications. And then, in certain places and situations, it stopped working. Here is why — and what fills the gap.
UGV
The UGV Connectivity Problem: Why 50,000 Ground Robots Need a Better Link Than Starlink
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.
aerostats
Notable Aerostat Incidents Around the World
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