Like Google’s Project Loon, but for missiles: Ukraine is weaponizing stratospheric balloons to boost strike range | Tech Radar
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Like Google’s Project Loon, but for missiles: Ukraine is weaponizing stratospheric balloons to boost strike range
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A Russian high-altitude stratospheric balloon is being prepared for launch in an open field, with ground crew and support vehicles positioned nearby. (Image credit: TV Zvezda)
Kyiv has floated more than 1,000 cheap balloons into Russia as decoys, relays, and now even launch platforms, with a balloon-dropped Hornet drone reportedly doubling its strike range to around 300 km
The DART missile drops from balloons at 12–18 km and deliberately kills its own navigation in the terminal phase, leaving Russian jammers nothing to attack
Prevailing west-to-east winds hand Ukraine a near-monopoly on the tactic, even as Russia trials its Barrazh-1 relay balloon as an alternative to Starlink
Google might have written off its Project Loon endeavor, a goal to use stratospheric balloons as flying cell towers due to economic considerations, but they are back in an unexpected setting: a deepening frontline between Ukraine and Russia.
This is largely because Ukraine has cracked the economics with the business model that Alphabet, Google's parent company, could not have: a cheap, easy-to-employ weapons platform that can't be jammed or shot down affordably while building up on its threat to Russian cities far from the frontlines.
The DART is a Ukraine-deployed, balloon-launched missile system developed by the Ukrainian firm Center of Innovative Technologies Program (CITP), which launches projectiles from the lower stratosphere at intended targets.
While most of the world continues to focus on better smart satellite- or laser-guided missiles (or precision-guided weapons), Ukraine is taking a different approach altogether, and it might be a much smarter play given how it could play out.
The balloon-based DART missile starts off 'smart', relying on satellite guidance to align and aim at a target before cutting off guidance altogether for the last 6km of the journey, relying only on its solid-fuel engine to reach its intended position.
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The approach, though slightly crude, renders Russian jammers completely ineffective, unable to pull a DART missile off-target or 'confuse' it in any way. The target seems not to be civilians or combatants but rather to restrict Russia's ability to wage war by targeting infrastructure because of how the missile functions.
DART carries a warhead of roughly 10 kilograms that scatters conductive graphite filaments, a small-scale graphite bomb meant to short out electrical infrastructure. This also means it might not need the level of precision that many other missiles do: power stations and electric grids tend to sprawl, making them much easier targets than alternatives.
The more impressive part might be that the balloons, which often cost as little as $200, can lure out expensive S-300 and S-400 interceptors to respond, depleting far more costly ammunition and batteries on the Russian side.
Ukraine is also a direct beneficiary of geography: winds across the front generally blow west to east, allowing balloons from Ukraine to easily reach Russian territory, while Russian ones have to fight the current, often floating back into their own territory as a result.
While DART remains uncodified by Ukraine's military, it has already been showcased at trade shows, with the Eurosatory defense expo outside Paris in June marking its first major outing. It also has both allies and adversaries taking notice as the Ukrainian conflict continues to offer modern battlefield lessons.
The US Army has been evaluating tethered aerostats for drone detection and communications relay, with an eye toward launching drone swarms from them in the future.
Russians, on the other hand, are investing in a different kind of drone technology: the Barrazh-1, a stratospheric relay balloon carrying a communications payload of roughly 100 kilograms, which it says is entirely domestically built and aims to balance out the lack of Starlink terminals available to the country for data and internet services on the battlefield.
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