RC planes, rockets, drones, helis, paper airplanes — it’s safe the say that there are now plenty of ways for hobbyists and amateurs to take to the skies. So, where do balloons fit in to all of this? Aside from achieving manned flight 120 years before the Wright brothers, balloons have been and continue to be a unique platform for performing scientific research, breaking records, and deploying cutting edge technology.

The BOOMERanG high altitude balloon telescope — designed to fly at 42km, above almost all of Earth’s atmosphere

So, you mean, hot air balloons?

Not exactly. Nowadays, when people say high altitude balloons they usually mean a balloon filled with a lighter-than-air gas, generally helium (though hydrogen is also used by those willing to accept some risk). The problem with hot air balloons is that they need to be, well, hot; and keeping them that way requires a constant input of energy from the burners at the bottom. Once you run out of fuel you run out of lift and have to land. In fact, paper airplanes and gliders aside, every other flying vehicle requires some energy input in order to keep flying. Lighter-than-air balloons, in contrast, are literally lifted up by gravity (through the weight of the air that they displace) so can fly as effortlessly as boats can float on water.

You said “high-altitude”, how high is “high”?

Very. In fact, high-altitude balloons (HABs) are the closest that we can get to space without using a rocket. In 1977, Russian pilot Alexandr Fedotov flew his MiG E-266M to an altitude of 123,523 feet, setting the altitude record for an airplane. That sounds very impressive until you realize that the amateur HAB altitude record currently stands at 147,648 feet — an altitude that places it above 99.85% of the atmosphere. In fact, flights above 120,000 feet can be reasonably achieved for under $1000 and without any extensive expertise. What’s more, if you fly above 112,500 feet you will be in air so thin that you can honestly say your balloon would fly above the surface of Mars!

So, what can I fly?

Anything. The beauty of balloon payloads is that as long as the payload is light enough to fly (typically up to 10kg/22lb for latex balloons) there are almost no restrictions on what the payload can contain. Want to fly a high quality DSLR camera? Sure. Want to drop an RC glider from an altitude of 15km? Have fun. Want to test a long-range optical communications link to talk to your payload at 1Gbit/s? Please do, that would be awesome! The thing we really love about HAB is that there’s practically no limit to the kind of payloads that we can design allowing us to do anything from quick and dirty flights that take 1 hour to prepare to extremely complex research projects that involve dozens of flights over several years to develop cutting edge technology.

Finally, flying a balloon mission with radio or satellite telemetry can really feel like sitting in mission control during a space mission. You’ve spent quite a bit of time and effort creating a semi-autonomous system; you’ve traveled to a launch site to set up, fill, and release the payload; and from the moment you let go you can watch the telemetry relayed via long range radio or satellite to track the position, predict the rest of the flight, and sometimes send commands to control the system. In the case of multi-day flights that leads to mission control shifts among our team and binge-watching Apollo-13 while we try to debug our electromechanical systems from 2000 miles away. For hobbyists who like to dabble in mechanical engineering, electronics, physics, computer science, and anything in between there’s really nothing quite like HAB.