Portfolio Update: Urban Sky wins STRATFI contract for stratospheric balloon technologies
Jeff Foust
WASHINGTON — Stratospheric ballooning company Urban Sky has won a contract from the U.S. Air Force to support development of technologies that enable small balloons to complement, or replace, satellites.
Denver-based Urban Sky announced Aug. 22 that it signed a Strategic Funds Increase, or STRATFI, contract with the Air Force Research Laboratory and AFWERX to support technology development for tactical stratospheric balloons.
The award includes $15 million in research and development funding and $15 million orders from government customers, said Andrew Antonio, chief executive of Urban Sky, in an interview. The STRATFI contract requires matching private investment, which comes from the $30 million Series B round the company raised in February.
The funding covers work in a variety of areas, including what he described as expanding the range of balloon products the company makes. “Early on, we made one size of balloon,” he said. “But now we’re building a suite of balloon systems that fit multiple mission needs for defense customers that also have dual-use capabilities.”
That includes, he said, small balloons designed to operate for several hours up to larger super-pressure balloons that could potentially spend months in the stratosphere.
Other work funded by the STRATFI includes development of automated systems for operating the balloons. The company’s current balloons require extensive control by human operators that he compared to driving a car with a manual transmission. The company’s goal it to create an autopilot system, he said, “where operators can say, ‘balloon, fly to this specific target,’ and the balloon will do so with its own onboard logic.”
Urban Sky started several years ago flying low-cost stratospheric balloons to take high-resolution imagery not available from satellites. The company found an initial niche in commercial markets such as insurance and oil and gas, but has expanded into defense applications such as tactical imagery and communications.
The work funded on the STRATFI for work on super-pressure balloons for the military will, in turn, have commercial uses. “The super-pressure balloon will truly unlock a commercial data business for Urban Sky,” Antonio said, combining the balloon with sensors the company will separately develop for imaging and other uses.
“Ultimately, we will deploy what I would call regional constellations of balloon systems to solve specific problems,” he said.
One example is establishing balloon systems that can operate for months over regions susceptible to wildfires, providing optical and infrared imagery to monitor fires. That, he stated, could provide targeted, cost-effective coverage of those regions.
Those efforts come as satellite imagery technologies advance. Several companies and organizations are developing satellite systems specifically for wildfire monitoring, while others, like Albedo, are developing very low Earth orbit (VLEO) satellites capable of sharper imagery approaching what aerial platforms like balloons can provide.
Balloon systems, Antonio argued, can still be competitive with satellites. “The core value is the combination of high resolution plus persistence,” he said. “There’s commercial satellites coming that promise higher resolution, but satellites cannot provide persistence.”
Satellite and balloons can complement each other, he said. “We don’t view ourselves as competitive to any of those new entrants in the VLEO space or satellites in general. In fact, we’re interested in using them as tipping and queuing methods for our balloon systems so that, if we’re not scanning over a certain region but a satellite detects something, we can redirect balloons to persist and continuously monitor.”
