Balloons

THE UK’s biggest hot air balloon fiesta has kicked off for its 48th year, with over 100 balloons set to descend on a major city.

Hosted over three days, this free festival celebrates the city’s heritage, with stunning displays throughout the day and night.

Bristol International Balloon Fiesta has kicked off with perfect blue skies, attracting approximately 500,000 people over the course of the weekend.

Beginning today, and continuing until Sunday (August 9) evening, there is a jam-packed programme of mass balloon ascents, balloon-themed displays, and food and drink.

The international festival takes place on the hills of Ashton Court Estate, a 850-acre historic park on the outskirts of Bristol city centre.

When the festival first opened in 1979, only 27 balloons took part — but now, visitors can expect to see four times that number, with balloons shaped like aliens, dragons, pandas, and more.

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The highlight of the experience is set to be the mass ascents, where over 100 hot air balloons take to the skies at dawn (around 6am) and dusk (around 6pm).

Visitors can also enjoy the beautiful lights of the hot air balloons at the evening Nightglows, where up to 25 hot air balloons set up in the main arena, before lighting up to a background of regional music.

Included in the entertainment is a thrilling display by the RAF Falcons, model planes, and the historic ballooning arena, as well as a deluxe Thatchers cider Balloon Bar.

These incredible scenes across Bristol can be enjoyed at Ashton Court Estate with a completely free admission ticket.

However, for those wanting a VIP experience, tickets to the Sky Lounge, which has a tented arena to view the mass ascents, costs £20 for children and £25 for adults.

Bristol International Balloon Fiesta will run from today until Sunday, August 9, with timetabled events scheduled between 6am and 9pm today and tomorrow, and until 6.15pm on Sunday.

Balloon-maker Aerostar says recent tests of its Lightning design as a launch platform for a single surveillance drone open a path to a larger “mothership” concept. The company envisions its high-altitude balloons carrying multiple high-endurance uncrewed aircraft that could search for targets and otherwise monitor broad swaths of the battlespace, and do so persistently for days or even weeks on end. These balloon motherships could also carry payloads configured for other missions, such as electronic warfare jamming, signal relay, or even attacking targets. These are capabilities the U.S. Army and other branches of the U.S. military are actively pursuing, and that other countries, including China and Ukraine, have been developing and fielding to varying degrees, as well.

Aerostar put out a press release last week regarding the testing of the Lightning balloon paired with the Apollo-R from drone-maker Icarus. TWZ subsequently reached out for more information.

“In the current test configuration with the Aerostar Lightning balloon, it’s one Apollo UAS [uncrewed aerial system] per balloon — the Lightning is our smaller, tactical micro-balloon designed to carry a single payload. However, the architecture is scalable,” Russ Van Der Werff, Aerostar’s Vice President of Stratospheric Solutions, told TWZ. “Our larger Aerostar Thunderhead platform can serve as a ‘mothership,’ carrying multiple Apollo-R’s (or other payloads).”

The balloons in Aerostar’s portfolio are modern high-altitude designs with GPS-assisted navigation systems that can transit to areas of interest and then, in many cases, hold their general position despite prevailing winds. By moderating their altitudes, they can remain on station persistently for long periods at a time. Control is exercised via satellite communication suites and/or line-of-sight links, the latter of which can also be used in relay as part of a mesh network made up of multiple balloons.

The Lightning design is capable of operating for up to three days while soaring at typical altitudes between 50,000 and 78,000 feet, and can carry payloads weighing up to 45 pounds, according to a company fact sheet. The larger Thunder has similar altitude performance (typical operations at between 55,000 and 75,000 feet), but can stay aloft for 60 days or more and has a payload capacity of up to 200 pounds.

The Apollo-R drone is a solar-powered, glider-like design that is also optimized for high-endurance flights at very high altitudes. The exact capabilities of the R model are not entirely clear, but Icarus has said in the past that the baseline Apollo design can fly up to 60,000 feet and remain airborne for weeks at a time.

“The Apollo-R is a powered UAS – not a one-way munition – so it’s designed to be recovered after completing its mission. It flies under its own power after separation from the balloon and can land at a designated recovery point,” Aerostar’s Van Der Werff also told us. “This recoverability is part of what makes the system cost-effective for ISR and communications relay missions, where the UAS can be reflown and payloads be recovered and reused. Should the mission dictate, the Apollo-R could be used in a one-way capability, with its price point in the low-six figures, this could be an attractive use case for certain end users.”

Aerostar Thunderhead Balloon System Full Video Updated 1 5 23

“In this case, the Icarus Apollo uses its own BLOS [beyond-line-of-sight] radio so it doesn’t need the balloon for comms after drop. However, in support of other UAS, the Aerostar balloon systems can also serve as a stratospheric communications relay node,” Van Der Werff added. Aerostar’s platforms carry mesh-networking radios that provide high-bandwidth, line-of-sight data links with ranges exceeding 100 miles and throughput up to 40 Mbps. The UAS communicates with the balloon’s onboard radio, and the balloon relays that data back to ground stations — effectively giving the drone a much longer communications reach than it could achieve on its own at lower altitudes.”

“The balloon essentially acts as a high-altitude communications tower, extending the UAS’s effective operating range far beyond what a ground-based radio link could provide for normal military operations,” he also noted.

As already mentioned, Van Der Werff made clear that Aerostar sees the Lightning/Apollo combination as a step toward a larger capability set, and that the company’s Thunderhead could carry several Apollo-R drones on a single mission. The same scalable architecture could potentially support “deploying multiple effects from a single, persistent stratospheric platform,” which might include “multiple ALE kits,” he said.

ALE here is the abbreviation for “air-launched effects,” a term the U.S. military now commonly uses to collectively talk about air-launched drones configured for a wide array of missions. The ALE umbrella encompasses designs that can be used for surveillance and reconnaissance, electronic warfare tasks, or signal relay, as well as act as a decoy. It also includes loitering munitions, also often referred to as kamikaze drones, capable of carrying kinetic attacks. The ALE term has also been broadened more recently to just “launched effects” to cover uncrewed systems that can also be launched from platforms on the ground or at sea.

Aerostar’s Van Der Werff also highlighted benefits that using high-altitude balloons can offer in terms of flexibility, especially in the context of expeditionary and distributed operations where access to traditional runways that support crewed or uncrewed aircraft may be limited or unavailable entirely. There are also certain advantages in terms of survivability and cost.

Thunderhead Balloon System Launch

“An Aerostar Lightning balloon with an Icarus UAS can be launched by a small team from almost anywhere – no runway, no fixed site. It operates in the stratosphere, above conventional air defense threat envelopes, and provides persistent coverage measured in days or weeks rather than hours,” he explained. “For distributed operations, this means a forward-deployed unit can establish its own organic sensing and communications relay capability without depending on theater-level ISR [intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance] assets or vulnerable fixed infrastructure.”

“The system is inherently survivable because it’s small, operates at extreme altitude, is difficult to detect and target, and is inexpensive enough to be treated as attritable if necessary — unlike a[n RQ-4] Global Hawk or [MQ-9] Reaper [drone] that represents hundreds of millions in sunk cost,” he added. “You can distribute many of these across a theater and create a mesh of persistent sensing that’s resilient to individual node loss.”

TWZ has been drawing attention to the military utility of high-altitude balloons for ISR and other missions for exactly these reasons for years now. Aerostar has a long history now in this market space, too, but is not the only company advancing these kinds of capabilities, which are themselves not entirely new.

Just last month, the U.S. Army also demonstrated the ability of Apollo-R to be launched from a different high-altitude balloon from a company called Urban Sky during Exercise Valiant Shield 2026 in the Pacific. The Army has directly supported Apollo-R’s development through its xTech innovation challenge initiative.

Earlier in the year, during Exercise African Lion 26, high-altitude balloons carrying drones were also launched from the Army’s General Frank S. Besson class Logistics Support Vessel (LSV) USAV Maj. Gen. Charles P. Gross off the coast of Morocco. This also underscores the aforementioned points about the flexibility of where balloons can be deployed from.

The U.S. Marine Corps, the U.S. special operations community, and other elements of the U.S. military are also actively pursuing high-altitude balloon-based systems to perform various missions. The U.S. Naval Research Laboratory (NRL) notably conducted extensive testing of drones launched from single high-altitude balloons in the 2010s as part of a project called Close-in Covert Autonomous Disposable Aircraft (CICADA). Those tests also demonstrated a tiered capability in which slightly larger drones launched the smaller CICADAs after being released from the balloons.

This being said, the Army has been a clear leader in the U.S. military in this regard. The service has previously outlined a vision for establishing “persistent, all-domain sensor architecture for the Indo-Pacific theater” in which high-altitude balloons are a central component. The Army has also talked in the past about using high-altitude balloons to deploy swarms of drones and loitering munitions, as well as seed remotely-operated sensors on the ground, deep inside enemy territory.

Last year, the Army disclosed plans to launch as many as 100 high-altitude balloons, and maybe even more, in an upcoming exercise. In that instance, the service also highlighted how these lighter-than-air platforms could offer a hedge against the loss of critical space-based capabilities.

“Our primary goal is to demonstrate autonomous swarming capabilities that generate a persistent, cost-effective presence in the stratosphere,” Andrew Evans, Director of Strategy and Transformation with the Office of the Deputy Chief of Staff of the Army, or G-2, told Breaking Defense in an interview in August 2025. “Once operationalized, this type of capability will enable us to conduct a range of military operations including enhanced intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance (ISR), the extension of tactical communications, and the rapid reconstitution of on-orbit capabilities when space is denied or degraded.”

These are capabilities that U.S. forces, among others, could employ beyond the Pacific region, too.

“The challenge on the eastern flank [of NATO in Europe] is fundamentally one of persistence, survivability, and logistics. Legacy ISR approaches – manned aircraft, large UAVs, fixed ground sensors – are increasingly vulnerable in contested environments with advanced integrated air defense systems,” Aerostar’s Van Der Werff told us, outlining another regional use case. “They require significant ground infrastructure, large runways, and complex logistics chains. In a distributed operations concept across vast areas like the Baltics or Eastern Europe, those dependencies become liabilities.”

Balloon-launched drones are already seeing use to a degree in the conflict in Ukraine, where lighter-than-air platforms are also being used for surveillance and as decoys. Driven heavily now by the threat of spillover from the fighting in Ukraine, Poland is in the process of establishing a new early warning radar network utilizing tethered aerostats, too.

TWZ has previously outlined major investments in balloon-launched drone swarm capabilities in China, as well, as you can read more about here. High-altitude-balloons, in general, became a global cause célèbre after a Chinese intelligence-gathering type passed over parts of the United States and Canada, before being shot down over the Atlantic Ocean, in 2023.

For Aerostar, the company now sees ‘drone mothership’ as another important role on the horizon for its Thunderhead high-altitude balloon. The smaller Lightning design paired with the Apollo-R drone is providing a stepping stone toward that concept, while also capability that could still be valuable, if more limited, in the near term.

Contact the author: joe@twz.com

The use of high-altitude balloons is becoming ever-more routine for U.S. Army units in the Pacific. The service is pushing to deploy more of these lighter-than-air platforms as a key component of a new persistent surveillance and reconnaissance ecosystem across the region. The same kinds of balloons could also perform these and other missions, including communications relay, electronic warfare, or even launching kinetic strikes, around the globe. This is all underscored by a recent contracting notice about the potential purchase of commercial-off-the-shelf high-altitude balloons, sensor packages, and datalinks connected to SpaceX’s space-based Starlink network.

“This is a commodity requirement for commercial-off-the-shelf (COTS) or modified-COTS high-altitude balloon systems and associated equipment,” according to the contracting notice from the Army’s 921st Contracting Support Battalion, which was posted online earlier this week. “The required supplies and software licenses will be delivered to locations within the INDOPACOM AOR [U.S. Indo-Pacific Command area of responsibility] (specifically Hawaii).”

The notice stresses that the 921st is currently only conducting “market research” and that a “full and open competition” could follow, but is not guaranteed. The battalion is headquartered in Hawaii, but is the Army’s main contracting arm in the Pacific, and has elements spread across the region.

The “commodity requirement” the 921st outlined in the notice includes a call for 15 high-altitude balloons, five each of three different sizes (12-, 16-, and 24-gore). The term gore here refers to the individual segments making up the balloon’s exterior. A greater number typically translates to a larger inflated volume, and, by extension, to higher altitude capability and/or payload capacity. The contracting notice mentions a desired “burst altitude (90k–120k ft class)” for the 24-gore type, but does not otherwise lay out specific performance or payload requirements for any of the balloons.

The notice also includes a call for several different sensor packages, described as follows:

• Five “EO/IR [Electro-optical/infared]” types with “resolution (1080p/4K/MWIR/LWIR); gimbal stabilization; telemetry bandwidth (Starlink/LTE/MPU5); power draw; onboard processing; environmental hardening.”
• Five “Long Wave Infrared” types with “Spectral band (8–14 μm); NETD sensitivity (≤50 mK ideal); optics (germanium lenses, FOV options); thermal stabilization; data interface (Ethernet/SDI/USB-C).”
• Seven “Electronic Sensing” types capable of providing “(RF/EM/atmospheric/SIGINT); frequency coverage; antenna configuration (omni/directional/array); data logging (local vs. downlink); EMI shielding for high-altitude ops.”

The Army would also want eight payload buses with Starlink connectivity and MPU5 radios, as well as seven more with Starlink only. This separately speaks to the growing prevalence of Starlink, and its government-focused cousin, Starshield, across the U.S. military, something TWZ just recently highlighted.

There is also a call for helium and other ancillary items to complete the full package. The contracting notice does not say whether or not these balloons and other equipment would be intended for operational use, training, and/or supporting test and evaluation activities. TWZ has reached out to U.S. Army Pacific (USARPAC) for more information.

Use of balloons by the Army and other branches of the U.S. military, as well as other countries globally, both historically and as part of more contemporary activities, is not new. This is something TWZ had been calling attention to for years before a Chinese spy balloon passing over parts of the United States and Canada in 2023 thrust the topic into the public consciousness. China has used balloons and other kinds of lighter-than-air craft for intelligence-gathering and other purposes across the Pacific. The use of high-altitude balloons as launch platforms for swarms of drones and other payloads has also been an active area of development in China. This is something the U.S. military and others have also been experimenting with.

Modern high-altitude balloons can stay aloft for days, weeks, or even months on end. There are designs that can be precisely navigated to areas of interest and then hold their general position in spite of prevailing winds, moderating their altitudes to remain on station persistently for very long periods at a time. As the recent contracting notice makes clear, these balloons also have sufficient payload capacity to act as intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance (ISR) platforms, as well as signal relay nodes. They could perform other missions, too.

In 2024, the Army made a particularly public demonstration of the value of high-altitude balloons in modern operations during Exercise Valiant Shield 24. Balloons fitted with “electromagnetic spectrum sensors and radio networking equipment” were part of the kill chain in a live-fire test of Precision Strike Missile (PrSM) short-range ballistic missiles against a moving target ship. Valiant Shield 24 involved forces deployed to various locations across the Pacific.

Also in 2024, the Army’s Communications-Electronics Command (CECOM) put out a contracting notice seeking details about prospective small radars and signals intelligence suites for use on high-altitude balloons. The mention of radars here highlighted how balloons could provide another layer of ground-moving target indicator and synthetic aperture radar imaging (GMTI/SAR) capability.

CECOM’s request for information was specifically tied to an experimentation and demonstration effort called High-Altitude Platform-Deep Sensing (HAP-DS). The Army said at the time that the goal was for HAP-DS to feed into a larger program called the High-Altitude Extended-Range Long-Endurance Intelligence Observation System (HELIOS).

The Army has continued to expand its experimental efforts since then with a clear eye toward future operational capabilities. Last year, the service disclosed plans to launch as many as 100 balloons, and maybe even more, in an upcoming exercise.

“Our primary goal is to demonstrate autonomous swarming capabilities that generate a persistent, cost-effective presence in the stratosphere,” Andrew Evans, Director of Strategy and Transformation with the Office of the Deputy Chief of Staff of the Army, or G-2, told Breaking Defense in an interview in August 2025. “Once operationalized, this type of capability will enable us to conduct a range of military operations including enhanced intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance (ISR), the extension of tactical communications, and the rapid reconstitution of on-orbit capabilities when space is denied or degraded.”

At that time, Evans also highlighted how large groups of high-altitude balloons networked together could help provide resiliency against potential losses, including just due to bad weather.

Large numbers of balloons would be needed to provide wide-area persistent coverage for ISR and other missions. They could also be used to create mesh and other kinds of hub-and-spoke-type networks, which could be especially valuable if communications assets in low Earth orbit (LEO) are threatened.

Earlier this year, the Army shared that it had established a new schoolhouse for high-altitude balloon training, including a basic skills course for “High-Altitude Soldiers”, at Joint Base Lewis-McChord in Washington State. As of March, Army Green Berets, as well as Air Force personnel from weather units, and even individuals from unnamed civilian agencies, were said to have gone through the training program.

The Army has said that the training program includes the use of 16-gore high-altitude balloons – one of the types mentioned in the recent contracting notice – made by a company called Urban Sky. This is from a line of what the firm markets as “Microballoons,” which can be deployed by relatively small teams in minutes. Urban Sky says its 16-gore design can soar at altitudes up to 70,000 feet and carry payloads weighing up to 50 pounds. The company also offers a payload called Wallabee that combines “EO/IR imaging, signals intelligence, and communications downlink in a single package,” again fully in line with the “commodity requirement” recently outlined by the 921st Contracting Support Battalion.

Other companies, including Aerostar and the Sierra Nevada Corporation, also offer broadly similar designs that can be configured for ISR, signal relay, and other missions.

Raven Aerostar – Thunderhead Balloon System

“Routine events such as the AHABC [Army High-Altitude Basics Course], conducted here at home station, have enabled our unit to both maintain individual proficiency and provide more repetitions to leaders to sharpen their HA skills,” Army Capt. Tyler McWilliam, described as a “High-Altitude Planner,” said in an official release in March. “The plan for the future is to offer more High-Altitude Basic Courses for service members in other units to spread High-Altitude knowledge across the joint force.”

The Army has made no secret about the overarching end-goal of its current high-altitude balloon plans. The service is moving “forward in building a persistent, all-domain sensor architecture for the Indo-Pacific theater,” the March press release stated right up front.

The complete architecture is also set to include other components, including the Army’s new High Accuracy Detection and Exploitation System (HADES) ISR business jets. Glider-like drones also designed to operate in the stratosphere are something else the service has been actively experimenting with in recent years. As noted, like China and others, the U.S. military has also been exploring high-altitude balloons as launch platforms for swarms of drones deep inside hostile territory. This, in turn, has opened the door to the potential for using balloons to launch kamikaze drones and other kinds of munitions. They could carry electronic warfare payloads or seed small sensors on the ground, too.

All this being said, despite the Army’s clear support for high-altitude balloons, and years of experimentation, the service still has yet to put them into more widespread operational use. There is a distinct and continued disparity here compared to China’s extensive use of balloons and other lighter-than-air craft in the Pacific.

The capabilities that high-altitude balloons stand to offer the U.S. military could be very relevant for providing persistent surveillance and supporting other missions elsewhere globally, too. U.S. Central Command has previously highlighted interest in using lighter-than-air platforms to help meet high demand for ISR capacity across the Middle East.

The recent contracting notice, as well as the establishment of the new training programs at Joint Base Lewis-McChord, do show that the Army is pressing ahead with its plans to make high-altitude balloons a more regular aspect of its operations, especially in the Pacific.

Contact the author: joe@twz.com