During his first hearing at the National Assembly as Chief of Staff of the Air & Space Force [CEMAAE]General Jérôme Bellanger spoke about the challenges of Very High Altitude [THA]. “It is an area in which we absolutely must invest, because it is dual and it allows resilient systems in terms of communications and in terms of surveillance” and also “because, nature abhors a vacuum, If we don’t go, others will go in our place.” And to insist: It is “out of the question to have Chinese balloons positioned above our heads in Paris and observing us”.
As a reminder, HAT is likely to become a new area of conflict, due to the lack of a sufficiently precise legal framework to regulate it. Indeed, to date, there is no consensus on the definition of the lower limit of outer space and the upper limit of airspace. Hence a vagueness that certain countries are trying to exploit, as shown by the affair of the Chinese spy balloon shot down off the coast of South Carolina by a US Air Force F-22A Raptor in February 2023.
Last year, the Air & Space Force [AAE] has developed a strategy dedicated to this HAT. Strategy whose implementation was recently entrusted to General Alexis Rougier within the EMAAE. That being said, General Bellanger explained to the deputies that it would be necessary to equip ourselves with “means of neutralization” [et donc d’intervention] in this Very High Altitude, which he described as the “Far West”. And that this involved the “exploration” of certain capacities, in conjunction with certain manufacturers.
If, with regard to THA, the Zephyr pseudosatellite from Airbus and the Stratobus from Thales Alenia Space are regularly cited, other solutions are on the verge of becoming a reality.
Thus, founded in 2016, the Toulouse company Zephalto, recently successfully carried out the test flight of a pressurized capsule which, with two people on board, rose to an altitude of 6,000 meters at using a balloon. The goal is to be able to take passengers into the stratosphere for commercial purposes [il s’agit de développer une nouvelle sorte de « tourisme spatial »]. But not only because it is also a question of carrying out flights for scientific and technological experiments.
Having also invested in this niche, the Hemeria company has just successfully carried out the first test flight of its stratospheric maneuvering balloon BalMan, designed under the project management of the National Center for Space Studies [CNES].
“On the night of October 30, the balloon maneuvering BalMan […] successfully carried out its first flight test, from the Guiana Space Center, thus validating the reliability of the stratospheric balloon envelope and flight safety systems in high altitude conditions,” indicated the CNES, via a press release released this November 6.
This stratospheric maneuvering balloon project is also supported by the Directorate General of Armaments [DGA]. It is also financed by France Relance.
The objective of this project, explains CNES, is to have the “capacity to remain above a geographical area of interest, at several tens of kilometers of altitude, much longer than [ne] a drift balloon, a plane, or even a drone can do it.” To do this, the aerostat operators “use wind currents at different altitudes in order to [le] move horizontally”. This opens the field to numerous applications, both military and civil.
According to Hemeria, this maneuvering stratospheric balloon will “facilitate access to space at lower cost”, “fly over an area of interest for longer” and “reduce logistical constraints”.
As a reminder, the stratosphere is located between ten and fifty kilometers in altitude, that is to say between the troposphere and the mesosphere.
A second flight of this BalMan should take place sometime next year. This time it will be a question of testing its ability to carry a payload of 50 kg. Activities around this aerostat “will now continue to quickly offer this technology to the scientific, defense communities or commercial operators,” argued Caroline Laurent, director of Orbital Systems and Applications at CNES.
Photo : Hemeria
