How World View’s high-altitude balloons could replace satellites

Inside World View’s campus in Tucson, Arizona.World View

About 1,900 active satellites are orbiting Earth as you read this sentence. That may seem like a lot of stuff in the sky, but more than twice as many airplanes soar overhead at any given moment, adding up to tens of millions of commercial flights per year.

The reason we don’t launch more commercial satellites to watch the environment, speed up the internet, or gather military intelligence is because getting to space is expensive. Very expensive.

Elon Musk’s aerospace company, SpaceX, is slashing prices with reusable rocket technologies (and Jeff Bezos’ competitor, Blue Origin, is not far behind), but those discount launches still cost tens of millions of dollars.

World View Enterprises in Tucson, Arizona, thinks satellite-like capabilities can be achieved at a fraction of the cost. Their big idea: use giant autonomous balloons that operate in a world between spacecraft and aircraft.

The six-year-old company is developing and launching pyramid-shaped platforms called Stratollites that dangle from the end of high-altitude balloons. These balloons soar to about 20 miles high and exploit high-altitude winds to stay put or move.

“It’s going to change everything,” Ron Garan, a retired NASA astronaut and fighter pilot who works for World View, told Business Insider. “Think about what you can do with a 10,000-pound or a 1,000-pound payload platform that’s hovering over a city or a natural disaster for months at a time.”

Garan and others recently toured us around World View’s global headquarters in Tucson, Arizona, which is a 142,000-square-foot campus complete with a balloon factory, spaceport, mission control center, and more.

Here’s what it’s like inside World View, and how the company is working to not only disrupt a big chunk of the satellite industry, but also give tourists a taste of what it’s like in space.

…And launching toward the stratosphere with an astronaut as your pilot.

An illustration of World View’s Voyager space capsule floating in the atmosphere at the end of a high-altitude balloon.World View

Antonio says “there’s no immediate Voyager test flight on the horizon” but that World View considers “every Stratollite mission to be critical to the Voyager program.”

When the first flight capsules are finally ready to launch, the company plans to give a few tickets away to teachers, students, artists, and others who break the traditional mold.

“To date we’ve sent pilots and engineers and scientists to space. What happens when you send musicians and poets and artists?” Garan said. “How much better will they be at communicating this amazing planet that we live on?””