Lighter Than Air, Heavier Than It Looks
It’s been just over a week since we launched one of the world’s most advanced aerostats at Thinking Balloon (yet also one of the cheapest!). The team is already deep into the next iteration: much better weather stability (next version will have >99% weather uptime), better autonomy, and A LOT of other upgrades.
We believe this is going to enable “escape velocity” for aerostat tech, allowing it to be used for a wide range of applications, both military and civilian (some of which can get quite sci-fi!).
We’re excited about the progress we’ve made, and about the products in the pipeline coming to market over the next few months and years. But I’d be remiss if I didn’t acknowledge that autonomous aerostats carry a particularly high abuse potential when it comes to domestic mass surveillance. They can do surveillance (geographic and signals) at a scale and efficiency that wasn’t previously possible. So we need to make sure this tech gets deployed responsibly, and that it doesn’t infringe on civil liberties or weaken liberal democratic norms. We’d love for this to be a race to the top, where we set new standards for responsible use of aerostats, and one where we don’t have to make a tradeoff between security and privacy.
We’ll have a lot more to share in the coming months as we keep pushing the boundaries of lighter-than-air tech, and make sure it ends up being net good for humanity.
Watch the highlights from the first launch: