Because Sometimes a Chicken Sandwich Needs to Get to Space

They reached out to us and asked us if we could launch a chicken sandwich to the edge of space, where they would fly it across the country and video it the entire time, and you could log into a website and see where the chicken sandwich was. Today you've got thousands of satellites flying over your head. You don't even think about it. You do.

Most people—

I know you do.

Yeah.

In the stratosphere, you don't really have that. And so, you know, we believe that you will in a decade and that it'll be second nature to you when there's dozens of balloons hovering over San Francisco as satellites above your head.

Today on Core Memory, we are going up into the stratosphere. We're going to talk balloons. There is a lot about balloon technology that I have oddly come to know over the years and I would like you to know as well. We're gonna be talking to Andrew Antonio. He's a guy I've known for, for ages. He's the co-founder of a company called Urban Sky based in Colorado. They make these small balloons that can take photos, that can take measurements to do all kinds of things with, with moderately sized payloads. And, um, and then Andrew is just, uh, he's been in the balloon business for a long time, so he's got good stories about doing weird things to, to people people and objects up in the stratosphere. So I think you'll enjoy it. As always, please go visit Core Memory and subscribe to our YouTube channel if that is where you like to get your videos and podcasts. And also, as always, we appreciate you listening. How are you?

I'm good. Good to see you again, Ashlee Vance. How are you?

We've Known each other for quite a while now through, uh, balloons brought us together. Who would, who would have thought?

It's a strange way to meet someone, but it's worked for us.

I didn't know whether to begin with sending a chicken sandwich to space or a human to space in a balloon, but I, I've decided to, to settle on the, on the human and then people will have to stay, stay tuned for the chicken sandwich in space. Uh, Just to give people some context, unless I'm wrong, this project that was called StratEx, which I think was 2012?

That's correct.

Right? I think that— was that your introduction to the balloon world? And can you tell people what you were doing with that?

Yeah. So I met my co-founder Jared Leidich in the desert of Roswell, New Mexico, where we were working on Project StratEx that broke the world record for the highest human balloon flight and skydive of all time. So Alan Eustace was Chief of Knowledge, SVP of Engineering at Google.

Yeah, just like a Google dude.

Just a regular guy for all intents, but he really isn't. He's an incredible human. And he self-financed a project to— well, let me back up. Everyone remembers the Red Bull space dive, I think, for the most part. If you don't, look it up. It was a huge mostly PR and scientific project that initially broke the world record for the highest human balloon flight in skydive ever. And, and Alan really stepped in after that project or kind of around the same time. There was some development going on, but Alan wanted to build a system and a spacesuit that would allow people to explore the stratosphere in much the same way that we scuba dive today. So he was really, you know, looking at it from an engineering lens and trying to solve hard engineering problems to make it more routine and easy for people to, to explore the stratosphere. And so that's where I sort of stepped into the ballooning world and I met my co-founder. Now, I will be honest, I was not scientifically important in any way to StratEx. My co-founder was. He led the spacesuit team for that, that project. But I was there supporting the operations team and it resulted in us breaking the world record. We flew Alan to 136,000 feet roughly. Above Earth and, uh, he skydived back down.

Yeah, and like, I mean, like you said, people might remember the— I don't know why the Red Bull, I guess just because probably they're pumping a ton of money into marketing, why people might remember that one more. But, but, um, there's those images. I mean, you— it's somebody basically standing at the edge of where the, the atmosphere starts to give way to, to official space, right? And, and then they're just jumping out of a gondola, free falling.

That's exactly right. Yeah. And Red Bull, look, to their credit, they invested in a lot of incredible technology to make that happen. But it, it was mostly a publicity stunt to sell Red Bull, right? Whereas Alan took the perspective that he wanted to solve a lot of the really hard engineering problems that were not previously solved. Number one, you said Red Bull was jumping out of a capsule. Alan, we literally built a spacesuit and attached the spacesuit to the balloon. With no capsule, number one, that eliminated what mass of the system so we could go higher. But number two, it eliminated a lot of the complexity and made it safer in a sense to execute the mission.

And then not to go— because I'm going to butcher some of the history here because I read about it a long time ago, but there was this thing called Project Manhigh and this guy Joe Kittinger, or I think people say Kittinger, He had set the record, I think it was like the 1950s, right?

It's exactly right.

Okay, so, you know, it's like the 1950s, and then, and then all these decades pass until somebody even tries to do this again. But back in the, the day, the U.S. military wanted to try to figure out what humans could endure, and so they were sending people at crazy high speeds across the desert in sleds and then putting up putting them up really high and depriving them of oxygen and freezing them and just seeing what people could tolerate. So he had set this record and then, um, all these years passed. Well, you know, why, why were there these like two attempts in such close succession after all that time?

Yeah, that's a really good question. Um, I, I don't know is the answer. I don't know why these things happen so, so closely in succession, but it is true that the early history of stratospheric ballooning was, they're kind of the early astronauts if you think about it. They were going higher and further than anybody else. Colonel Joe Kittinger went to a little over 100,000 feet sponsored by the military. Um, again, I think you'd have to ask Alan, and I think if you did, he would say at least for his project, he was, uh, always passionate about skydiving. And for him, this was a really interesting way to build a system that could democratize access to the stratosphere eventually, and again, let people scuba dive in the stratosphere, for lack of a better word. And it just happened to be around the time that Red Bull did it, but there was not a ton of collaboration between those projects. They were just coincidental.

And so, okay, so before you're doing that, what, how, okay, how old are you when, when you worked on that project?

Oh gosh, I was 23 years old. I'm now 34.

So you'd just been like coming out of college and just happened to run into people that were trying to have a guy jump from space?

Yeah, I mean, my, my entry point into it all is I worked at a big Fortune 100 company called Danaher, and it was a good business, but I wasn't super passionate about what I was doing my first year out of college. And I, I shot my shot at a couple founders back in the day and basically said, look, I'll quit my job and come work for you for nothing. I want to be part of something bigger than myself. And I've always wanted to work in the space industry. And so at the time, they didn't really have a company, but that company, as you know, was, was called World View. And it was just a few people with a dream to build a space tourism experience via high-altitude balloon. And when I joined that, that company, they did, they said yes. They replied to my email and said, yeah, look, we don't really have money to pay you, but if you want to come hang out with us and build some cool stuff, like, welcome aboard. And so I did, and I took that leap and Uh, when I first got there, the, the founders of Worldview were also the leaders of the company that was, uh, the prime contractor on this space dive. It was called Paragon. So for the first year or so, we were really just focused on finishing that project. So I was technically an employee of Worldview, but kept going out into Roswell and just supporting the StratEx team until that project wrapped up. And then a lot of that team, including my co-founder Jared, joined Worldview. And that's, that's where we really started.

Yeah. Okay. Well, we're, we'll get into worldview now. Just the, the found the Paragon, the company you're mentioning. Um, people should, well, okay. First of all, people should go look up a book called The Pre-Astronauts by Craig Ryan because it talks all about Project Manhigh and it's, it's a, it's a book that is fantastic and it's not, not purchased in the quantities that it, it should be. And then, and then Paragon has some interesting history. I wrote about them in my, my Elon book where. They were just kind of these weird project, often space-related enthusiasts, and they'd been working on the original design for the, you know, before Elon started SpaceX, he wanted to, he wanted, he just wanted to do something in space and he wanted to grow a plant on Mars and have this like camera on the plant to just show people that there could be Life on Mars as like a publicity stunt, and the Paragon and Worldview founders were working with him on that too. It's just, it's a weird segment of aerospace land.

It's absolutely right.

Yeah. Okay, okay, so Worldview is how we met, and maybe I'll describe it and then you tell me what I messed up, but you know, it was, This goal to make these much larger balloons that could carry a, a gondola of sufficient size so, you know, people could go to space, go to the edge of space and hang out up there and, and actually maybe have like a bathroom and some champagne and look out the windows instead of being blasted off in a rocket. And then, and then, you know, it turns out there's other uses for these balloons too. Beyond tourism. But, um, is that how the company started? What was, what was the original mission of Worldview?

Yeah, exactly right. The, the, the original mission was that we wanted to give people like you and me the orbital perspective, is what we call it, right? So this idea that you can see the planet and see it without borders and see this, this fragile blue dot and get that visceral experience with time, right? You said it, with, with any rocket experience, you're up there for a couple minutes and you're experiencing weightlessness, suborbital, of course, and then you're coming right back down. But with a stratospheric balloon, you know, the way balloons work is you can sort of float, we call it float, float at altitude for hours at a time. So you could sit up there for 4 or 5, 6 hours and look out these massive windows at this pale blue dot. And that was the original vision. And that's what we worked on for several years. And You know, again, it changed over time. We can get into how that happened, but that's what the company was founded to do, was give people that orbital perspective.

And had anyone— I mean, people see weather balloons, I'm sure, you know, or have seen weather balloons if they don't see them all the time. But, and we just talked about, I mean, some of this technology existed going back to the '50s, but, you know, had anybody tried to do sort of this tourism angle on balloons? And was there something about the worldview balloons Were they like significantly larger than what had come before, or what was the trick to making that kind of thing work?

Yeah, when we started the company, there, there was at least one other business in the world, was in Spain, that was trying to do something similar with a smaller capsule, less passengers, but it was right at that same time. So there was no other pursuit to do sort of space tourism via high altitude balloon when Worldview was was founded. And, you know, the technology had existed or could have existed before it. The, you know, the, the balloon itself was what we call a zero-pressure balloon. That technology had been around for decades. It was the balloons that took Colonel Joe Kittinger and Alan Eustace up to the stratosphere, building a pressurized capsule, you know, similar in many ways to building a spacecraft. So we were just really the first company to see that future and try to bring all those components together.

Okay. And as I remember, I think this is true, I mean, the tourism thing ends up taking a back seat to, to using these balloons to fly cameras, to do— this is kind of my favorite part of the technology— what, what is called station keeping, where, where you're actually, you're controlling these. I guess before I met you and got into this, I just always thought you're totally at the mercy of the winds, and I, I guess you are to some degree, but, but there's software and steering where you can, you can measure and navigate the winds, right? And so, so I remember the company's kind of primary business was taking payloads up into the stratosphere.

Yeah, that's right. Uh, yeah, the company broadened its, its vision to be really about, you know, not space tourism, but this idea that we wanted to pioneer radical new perspectives. And what could that mean? That was, that's a much bigger vision for a business. And really that meant flying payloads, flying, uh, systems for, uh, science research and people, of course. And that all sort of fits under one umbrella. But, but you know how this works at, at a company. A lot of it also was related to, uh, building a business and, and tracking towards near-term revenue and looking at ways to grow a company with the existing technology that we had faster. And so, you know, we had a balloon platform. It takes many, many years to build a spacecraft that people can fly in, but we could start flying payloads tomorrow that were scientific in nature and get paid to do that. So, you know, revenue in the business drove a lot of those decisions as well, and as they should. But yeah, like you said, what balloons can do that, that other platforms can't is this thing we call station keeping. It's, it's incredibly unique and specific to balloons that you can do what's called altitude control. You know this, you make a balloon go up and down and in various parts of the world at various times of year. You have different directional wind patterns. It's almost like a corkscrew as you go up and down between, say, 50,000 and 85,000 feet. You can steer, it's kind of like a sailboat, right? You're sailing along different winds. And if you make these box-like patterns, you can actually park a balloon over a particular area for days, weeks, months, even years at a time.

Yeah, I mean, it's fascinating because, yeah, I guess you've got a plane which obviously has lots of control, is relatively close to the ground, but is passing over objects at high speed. And then you've got satellites, which are incredibly expensive, super far away, and, and they can kind of station keep in that they can like point at one spot all the time. But, but from the resolution is tough and physics makes it hard to take good photos. Whereas with a balloon, you end up in this middle ground, right? And, and you can be closer and hang out over whatever you want to photograph or measure.

It's exactly right. Yeah. Resolution is, is much higher than, than a satellite. The endurance is much longer than an aircraft. And, but the thing that you get with a balloon that you get with nothing else is, is continuous monitoring. Persistence is just not something that exists, right? A helicopter can do it for a few hours, but if you want to, let's say, you know, for example, get to what we're doing at Urban Sky, but if you want to hover a balloon over a wildfire for several days and produce a map, every few minutes. That's something that a balloon allows you to do that no satellite aircraft or helicopter ever could.

Okay. All right. I promised people chicken sandwich in space.

Yeah.

While you were at Worldview, um, like you said, you're trying to build this business. I think you were in charge of marketing, if I was wrong. Okay. And, and, you know, want to— obviously companies want to get attention, let everyone know what, what they're doing. And if I remember right, I can't remember the full sequence of events, but I think didn't Kentucky Fried Chicken, KFC, did they come to you guys or you went to them to propose this idea?

They found us. They heard about our technology. I think they've read about it in Popular Science and, uh, they reached out to us and asked us if we could launch a chicken sandwich to the edge of space. And they had this super cool PR campaign that they wanted to do, uh, where they would fly it across the country and video it the entire time. And you could log into a website and see where the chicken sandwich was. It's tracked across the country.

And like, Rob Lowe was the, the mission control announcer on this. It was no joke. And, and I know I've written about this before, but now I'm old and I write a lot of stories. I, I, it didn't quite— did it— it got near space, right, but not, not all the way?

Yeah, we, we got to altitude, but it was— it did not fly as long as we wanted it to. Uh, so we did get up, but we did not stay up. For multiple days, but it was still a successful campaign for the company. You know, KFC was happy. They got a ton of incredible footage and were able to downlink in real time video of the chicken sandwich with the curvature of the Earth behind it. But this was a big engineering effort. You know, we joke about it and say this is like funny, but like behind the scenes, the amount of work that went into preparing a chicken sandwich, building camera systems that went around it to capture and downlink real-time video. And by the way, we were still doing R&D on WorldView's balloon system. So even the, the actual balloon that we flew was an R&D flight for KFC, and they knew that and they were excited about that.

And it had like a robotic case or something around it, didn't it?

It made it look like a satellite. Yeah, it was.

And then did it open up at the end?

I did not have anything that would robotically open. We opened it. We, when we recovered the chicken sandwich on the ground, we opened it. And grabbed the chicken. But yeah, you know how food artists work though, right? Like, they put so much epoxy and stuff on that chicken sandwich, I don't think I would have ever even taken a bite.

And like, didn't you guys have multiple actual KFC locations producing sandwiches for the artists?

Yeah, they did. Yeah, we had a food artist come out of the facility. It was fun.

There's a lot that goes into this. What did you— what did you think had become of your life as your— as You're spending day after day working on getting a chicken sandwich.

I loved every second of it. I mean, I'm not sure that all the engineers on the team loved every second of it, to be frank. But, you know, the lesson in that for me, it goes back to building a company that like building startups, as you know, this is a winding road. It's never a straight line to, hey, here's our vision and we're going to go from A to B to C. And KFC and that mission to me represented a means to our vision. And there's a paying customer that paid well to, to, to do a project that was funding our R&D. And so I would've taken a million more KFC phone calls if they were out there. But that was— we could talk about some of the other ones. We actually did get called. I can't say who, but certain car companies wanted to recreate projects like that. Some big hotel companies wanted to create— I could talk in generalities about it, but there were some interesting ideas.

What did they want to fly? I mean, you can't fly a car up there, right?

No, you can fly. You can fly a car up there, right? SpaceX put a car into space. We were going to do something similar with a balloon. Some of the cooler ones that I'll just put out in the world where we had a big brand, say a soft drink brand that was interested in— I don't know what the age of the listeners on your podcast, but we all know Santa comes to town around Christmas Eve. And so, you know, like an experiential program to to make sure people could see Santa when they looked up.

Okay.

Does that make sense?

Yeah, I like that. Okay. I have a feeling I might know which, which soda company that might be, but any other top, top memories?

Yeah, there were some other cool ideas, like some of the specific hotel company wanted to put an actual house under a balloon with some cameras on the inside. And so you could could look out in real time at the curvature of the Earth through the windows of the house. And actually the brand idea, there was a really good one, was it doesn't matter, you know, where you stay, you're, you're always home and home is planet Earth, right? Pretty cool because it's true. And astronauts would always talk about that, that like when they land back on Earth, they have this, this moment where as soon as they land, even if it's in Kazakhstan, they're like, I'm home. And so that the planet Earth is our home is the whole idea there.

Yeah, yeah. Well, that makes sense. That makes a lot of sense. And the— just to set up where we're going a little bit, I mean, so for these large balloons that World View was making, um, you know, how long did it take to fill them up? How long could they fly? And you just— you're talking about sending up cars and gondolas and all these things. I mean, so they can carry a decent chunk of weight. But yeah, I mean, can you give us like the basics of what a a large balloon launch looks like?

Yeah, so depending on payload mass, and we could fly, you know, anywhere from hundreds of pounds to thousands of pounds under one of Worldview's balloons. Those are large systems. They're anywhere from 100 feet tall to 400 or 500 feet tall at launch. So huge systems and millions of cubic feet in volume. Massive, right? The size of skyscrapers or very large apartment buildings. They're difficult to launch and operate. You need really good weather. So we have certain limitations on the types of weather conditions we can launch in. You generally need teams of 10 to 20 people on a launch line to put them into the sky. So it's a process. You basically need to operate from an airport or a fixed spaceport or facility like that. So they have a lot of value, but they're large, cumbersome, expensive, difficult things to deploy.

It's just super, I mean, it's fun. I got to hang out with you at a launch and I mean, it's a bit of a, it's helium, right? That's going into those. Yeah, so the helium's filling up and I mean, it kind of, it takes a little bit longer than, I don't know, that at least that I thought. I mean, it's a process to get the helium going in there. And then when it starts to go up, I mean, it's actually hard to describe. I think I wrote about it as a jellyfish or something like that, but it's not just like a hot air balloon that you're used to seeing floating around. It felt more amorphous and almost, not to anthropomorphize it too much, but like it was alive and this creature that's getting bigger and bigger and bigger and then going off on its journey.

Yeah, that's exactly what it— we call it a jellyfish too. That's exactly what it looks like.

I probably stole that from you. Sure. Okay, so you're doing You do that for a while and then you get like the entrepreneurial bug and you've seen what big balloons can do. And then, and you and Jared are, I'm sure, talking late at night about, um, other ways to maybe go about this. And so Urban Sky, I had a chance to go visit you guys maybe a couple years ago now, um, and see what you're up to. And so, I mean, I'll let you describe it, but in general it's, it's like a, it's a smaller, easier to launch Blue, right? Yeah.

Yeah. The, the big gap we saw in, in the space and why we started this company was, uh, think of Urban Sky like the Cube satellite of the stratosphere, that everything before us was in one of two categories. It was either these massive stratospheric balloons like you've seen that we made at Worldview that were very expensive, hundreds of thousands of dollars, you know, tons of people to operate, or you had one other category and it was weather balloons. Many people listening may know what a weather balloon is, right? It's like a little latex inexpensive, uh, balloon that usually is used for meteorological purposes. You can put radiosondes on it and do upper atmospheric observation for weather forecasting, but they're not controllable. They go up and they pop. So they're sort of, they fly up to altitude, they burst, and they come right back down. So there's not any long duration or control navigation with those systems. So, and there's nothing in between. So what we did at Urban Sky was say like, there has to be a middle ground. How do we create affordable systems that have some of the exquisite controls in the larger balloons. So let's make navigable station keeping, but rapidly deployable, low-cost systems that can be launched from virtually anywhere in a few minutes. And that's what we did. And so the way to think about that is we've built for our customers, uh, which are initially are, are a lot of US defense customers. It's like a personally deployable satellite, right? Imagine a soldier in a field. That, you know, the whole balloon itself weighs less than 12 pounds. They can pull it out of a backpack, unravel it, fill it with gas in 3 minutes, put any payload on it and deploy it from anywhere, a tiny boat, you know, the back of a pickup truck, it doesn't matter. So that's what the, we call the tactical stratosphere is, uh, controllable, small, uh, stratospheric balloons.

So the big ones, I mean, it's just so massive that you need a team of people to just deal with this huge chunk of plastic and getting it full of helium. And it's just a a process, whereas when I was with you guys, we had a dude in the back of a pickup truck with a helium tank, right? And I mean, it did. I've seen it with my own eyes. It just takes a few minutes and off it goes.

How—

I'm sure— how do you get this thing to station keep? How do you even have any directional anything with a balloon? Because I'm sure people would be thinking it goes up and you have no idea where it's going to come down, and that could be bad.

Yeah, so we have a lot of software in addition to the hardware where upper atmospheric weather modeling is really important to stratospheric ballooning. We have to, we have to know within a certain degree of accuracy where we believe the balloon will fly. And so we pull in many different weather forecasts to predict a flight path of the balloon. But then how do you station keep and navigate? So again, it goes back to altitude control. We have basically a vent at the top of the balloon and what we call a ballast at the bottom of the balloon. So, um, all the— back up a little bit. The types of balloons we make today are what's called zero pressure. So you put in a fixed amount of gas, they start to ascend, that gas expands as you ascend through the atmosphere, and eventually that balloon finds equilibrium. The pressure on the outside of the balloon is the same on the inside of the balloon. Excess gas actually vents out of the bottom of the balloon. So basically When that balloon is ready, uh, after about an hour of ascent, it floats like an ice cube on top of Earth's atmosphere. It finds its equilibrium. As soon as it gets to float altitude— and we can predict that with a very good degree of accuracy in terms of exactly what altitude we will float— then you can start to do altitude control maneuvers. And that's through either a vent at the top of the balloon or a ballast at the bottom. And when you vent gas off, what happens? You lose lift, balloon goes down, right? And then if you want to go back up, uh, you drop ballast mass off the bottom of the balloon. That lightens the balloon. With the same amount of gas, you're going to go up. So, um, that's how we steer. So we can do these, you know, multiple thousand-foot altitude control maneuvers while we're live predicting those differing stratospheric winds to station keep or navigate a balloon. And station keeping doesn't work everywhere all the time, right? I want to be clear on that. It's not like, uh, you know, we're not station keeping over Toronto in December, for example. It's like, it's a nuanced technical and atmospheric problem, but that's what our software does is it sort of trains people on where they can do certain missions.

And it's, it's automated. If you take off, you guys are in Colorado, you take off near Denver, um, is there somebody sitting there monitoring it the whole time? Is, is there a human that's steering it or the software's doing most of the, the mission?

Yeah, today we have like a, what we call a Level 1 autopilot today. So, um, it's the early version of Tesla Autopilot, so it can do some maneuvers itself, but it is always tended by a human being and the commands are approved and, uh, by a human being before they're executed. The future, uh, a lot of technology we're building is, is, is full autopilot into the system. So sort of a user could draw a box and say, I want it to station keep within this area for one week. And, um, our software will run a bunch of analysis to tell the user whether or not that's possible. And if it is, they will approve that mission and it'll start to execute it. Um, but I think importantly too, just, just to, to be clear, like, There are different types of balloons, and today our current balloons can fly for a few days, so they're not flying for months or a year. You know, that's what a zero-pressure balloon is. But in the future, um, and we just raised a Series B, we're going to start investing in technology that allows us to fly these small balloons for years at a time.

Okay. And, and, okay, I want to ask about that. Before we do, can you, can you fly it over a city with lots of buildings, or do you have to fly it in remote areas?

Yeah, we fly over, uh, cities with buildings and dense population all the time. These are incredibly safe vehicles. Uh, there are regulations for this type of balloon, so it's, it's not like we're total Wild Wild West just launching balloons over your head. It's like, it's fully coordinated with the FAA. We follow all the procedures. In fact, we go way above and beyond what's actually written in Code of Federal Regulations in terms of compliance. We file flight NOTAMs so pilots know that we're operating systems. But, but yeah, they do float over your head. We launch on average right now about 2 to 3 balloons a week as a company, and almost always those are going over, you know, populated areas.

And I know like the satellite imagery market a bit better. People use it to, you know, to monitor the environment, to watch, um, how cities are developing, all to gather all kinds of economic data. You already mentioned forest fires. That's another thing people look out for. Um, just anything where you're trying to, you're trying to get this assessment of, of changes that are happening, the health of things. And so it's all similar types of tasks with, with you guys?

It is, except for, uh, I go all the way back to the beginning of conversation where balloons can do something that satellites can't, which is persistent station keeping. So you know, this idea that— talk about a few that we're working on. Wildfires is one. This idea that you could create a map of a wildfire every few minutes. Satellites can't do that, won't be able to do that.

And like, and in that case, it's just to have the absolute best data on what's happening during a fire to help everybody out.

Yeah. You know, another one that we talk about is illegal pipeline tapping. I think you and I talked about this at Worldview, but, there's this, I, you know, a billion dollars literally every year is stolen from, from oil pipelines in South and Central America. And that's because they can't really get a good read on how this is happening, when it's happening in real time. They're in remote areas where pipelines exist. But if you had sort of, uh, a constellation of 20 stratospheric balloons hovering over South and Central America that could scan for certain things, right? We also do edge processing on board our payloads. So we could have cameras that are scanning for Hey, pickup truck is within X amount of distance of pipeline. This might be a problem. Let's take a look, downlink that data, have an operator look at it and say, okay, that is a problem. Let's continue to track that asset back to its point of origin and see if it's a bad actor or not, right? So like no satellite could do that. Aircraft couldn't do that. But like with a small balloon constellation, you can continuously monitor things like that. Yeah.

And you, can you put guns on the satellite?

Can you put guns on a satellite? Well, I know better than me.

You could— no, I mean, on the balloon. I'm sorry. You could, you could neutralize the, uh, the pipeline.

I'm not sure we would. I don't, I don't think that's a use case we would be going with.

Maybe. So, and, and, and you mentioned the— so you guys just raised $30 million, and then I saw you had, um, You've been— you were talking about it before, I think, doing, doing work with the DOD, right? I mean, and it's not just pictures that you guys take. You can put up sensors. I mean, just like basically anything that this, this balloon could carry.

Yeah, we're, we're, we're a platform company in much the same way that, you know, SpaceX really started as a rocket company, built a platform, and now they have Starlink. The way I view the world and our business is we've developed a platform. We have several types of balloons and software that control our systems. Um, and for the Department of Defense, that's what it is. It's a platform. They put a variety of payloads, whether it's cameras, communication systems, um, uh, you know, RF sensing payloads, you name it. Like, so the, the military views it as a, a new type of platform. And on that side, there's unique value in the stratosphere beyond everything we talked about with station keeping. But at high altitude, there's an economic asymmetry. That makes sense that like our balloons are in the tens of thousands of dollars, you know, per balloon in terms of price. And to, how do I put this, to eliminate them, uh, it costs significantly more than that price point to shoot something at that asset in the sky. So there's an element of, of the high ground and persistent station keeping with those payloads. There's, and there's also an element of economic asymmetry. Um, and so they kind of call us like the drone of the stratosphere, right? You see what's happening in, in Ukraine and Eastern Europe with drone warfare and things like that. Like the entire military is really looking at how do we build swarms of autonomous systems that sort of overwhelm and are difficult to deal with. And we are that in the stratosphere.

So, okay. Now that we've gone there, I mean, last, right after I, went to visit you last time, we had the whole China spy balloon thing. I mean, yeah, what is— what's the global state of, of balloon technology? And, and let's start there. Yeah, where, like, where does the US compare to everybody else when it comes to, to balloon efforts?

Yeah, I think we are the, the most advanced, uh, nation in the world. I can confidently say that from a stratospheric technology perspective. But we are aware of competing efforts and we're seeing more and more come out of— as you can imagine, you can look this up— China and Russia in particular with competing technologies, smaller balloons, bigger balloons that have more payload capacity and more control systems. So, you know, there is a bit of an arms race happening in the stratosphere right now. It's good that we're positioned where we are. But my personal opinion, of course, I'm biased, but I do think small systems are where we need to be. That's why I started this company. But this idea that, that you can swarm and that you can launch, you know, hundreds of our systems for maybe the same price that it would take to launch one large balloon, uh, is really interesting and differentiates us, especially when you look at that economic asymmetry of trying to eliminate these systems out of the sky. Again, you're gonna launch a $400,000 ballistic missile. That's the price of the missile that took down the Chinese balloon over the United States. That's what you would need to take down a small urban sky balloon, too. So it, it does not work competitively for people to try to shoot down these things at our price point.

Did you just get bombarded with phone calls from the press when that happened? And did you get calls from the military trying to figure out what was going on?

Yeah, we, we did. I would say a lot of people were asking our opinion on like, you know, what does this mean politically? And it's not my position to say what it means politically. I I think that we had a beat on what we think was happening, which is, it was really one of two things going on with the Chinese balloon. Either number one, it failed, and like their system was not operating effectively, because we were running our own flight models to predict where that balloon would or should go based on weather forecasts, and it wasn't doing any control maneuvers. It was pretty clear to us just looking at the data, the weather data, that it was moving in a uniform direction with the winds, it was kind of drifting. So number one, either it malfunctioned and sort of that balloon floated over the country because, uh, the Chinese could not control it, or number two, maybe we disabled it as a country, right? But like, either way— or, or three, I guess they chose not to control it. But it, you know, it appeared to be a balloon that could be controlled but was not being controlled as it flew over the country.

Yeah. And have we learned Well, you're in the balloon circles. I'm sure it's a pretty tight-knit community. You just laid out a couple scenarios, but have we learned any now that months and more than a year has passed? Has there been any interesting chatter about what actually was going on?

Short answer, no. Yeah, I think we're, you know, we're, we have as much information as you. I think the government obviously recovered it, but it was pretty tight-lipped on, on what it is and maybe what it was doing. So I don't, I don't have any information. I think we just, we just, all we can say pretty definitively is that it was drifting with the wind and it didn't appear to be, uh, controlled or steered in any way. But that again, it, it appeared to be technologically a balloon that would have those control mechanisms.

And obviously everyone freaked out about that balloon. So I assume we don't have like other countries' balloons hovering over the US on a regular basis?

Not that we're aware of. Um, you probably remember as soon as that balloon flew over the country, there were reports of additional ones that came out. There were some reports of systems around South and Central America. No confirmation on where those, whose those were. I don't think they were American balloons, so take that as you may. But yeah, not a lot of, I think, repeat balloon flights from China or other countries over the United States after that.

But you don't, like, back in the day, I mean, the French were, and I mean, way back in the day, I think I'm talking like early 1900s, 1900s if my memory serves. I mean, the French were into balloons, the Russians were into balloons, the Americans were. It was like a real thing. And then, at least in my head, I mean, yes, you had things like Project Mannheim to get Kittinger to space and things like the weather balloons, but you know, it didn't feel like there was just a ton of innovation going on. I mean, it felt like this was just some weird side area of aerospace. And then I know we talked about it a little on the, on the Stunt Chumps, but like clearly there's like a lot more economic activity. Is this, is this just the result of people realized what you and Worldview and others just came to the same conclusion that this was an interesting area? Or did we have to solve, you know, these software problems, these atmospheric sensor problems to start making this work. I was just, you know, obviously if you guys are doing what you're doing, we have Chinese balloons, I know the Israelis have balloons. I was just wondering why this is happening. Yeah.

And yeah, why now? Yeah, I think it's a little bit of everything you just said, which is, um, uh, number one, technology did develop to a point specifically for Urban Sky where we could not have built this company 10 years ago. A lot of our tech is around miniaturization of compute and sensors and lightweighting of telescope systems for imaging payloads. And so if we try to do what we're doing right now 10 years ago, our payloads would be, you know, 40, 50 pounds, but we're able to build camera systems that are less than 6 pounds today because that domain has really just opened up. So technologically, that would be one on the hardware side is things have gotten lower cost, lower mass, you know all this, right? But On the software side, yes, I think wind predictability and forecasting has improved significantly in the last decade. So an old-standing perception of balloons was you would, you would launch them and they would go in a different direction than you thought they would go. And that, how can you do that, right? Like, how could balloons ever really work at scale if, if you didn't know with a degree of precision where they were going to fly and could not control them? So forecasting has improved significantly. Many people have contributed to that. AI is supporting that as well. Now, of course, new, new types of AI forecasting models, many of which are pretty good, allow us to improve our accuracy at predicting flights, flight paths in particular. So a lot of things have happened. I think Jared and I were early in starting UrbanSky in a good, in a good way that, you know, when we started the company, a lot of these things didn't even exist and we just assumed they would develop over time and and, uh, that did happen. Uh, it was a good thing, but, you know, we were maybe a few years early in starting Urban Sky, but now we're, we're mature and it's caught up to us.

No, that's, I mean, that's probably the way to do it. Um, is to get the atmospheric data, like, why is that, why is that better? Where does that come from? Where are these sensors that are tracking what's actually happening in the atmosphere? Or it's just, it's just like the computer simulations, the models are just that much better.

A little bit of both. So, um, every single day across the world, you know, um, nearly 1,000 weather balloons are launched with radiosondes that sort of pierce the upper atmosphere and collect all this data about temperature and pressure and wind direction, wind speed, and all those things go into supercomputers and create forecasts that we all use and rely on. Every— you look at your, your phone and you've got a weather forecast, a large portion of that is coming from upper atmospheric weather observations. And so that's been around for a while, but the systems that can process that amount of data and interpolate it at scale have improved a lot in the last 5 years.

Is that, are those weather balloons, is that like a centralized, do all countries kind of feed in to some common platform that we've somehow agreed on something?

Yeah, it's globally available. We use many different models, but The GFS, the Global Forecasting System, is the primary one, and that's readily available free data to anyone that wants it. And I should also mention it's not just upper atmospheric balloons. Like, there are now satellite constellations that have different technologies that can look down and produce a different observation with weather data, and all of that's getting collected into systems that can produce better forecasts.

Okay. So like in the rocket world, you know, there's always this discussion of like, how much room is there for how many rocket makers, you know? And it's, I guess it's changed a little in that we're sending up so many more satellites now, but usually people come to the conclusion that yes, we need like 3 or 4 rocket makers, but we don't need 20. And you know, when you start talking about these swarms of balloons and And I was just, this all was making me wonder what your vision of the future looks like, how many balloons you think would actually be up in the air as we progress forward.

Yeah, so I think, you know, our vision is to see the stratosphere become as routine as space. And so today you've got thousands of satellites flying over your head. You don't even think about it. You do, most people don't. I know you do. Yeah. Uh, but in the stratosphere, you don't really have that. And so, you know, we believe that you will in a decade and that it'll be second nature to you when there's dozens of balloons hovering over San Francisco as satellites above your head. And, um, so our actual mission statement is to, uh, make the stratosphere, uh, routine and easy and to unlock the value within it. And so to us, that means building, uh, all the systems that allow us to launch eventually thousands of stratospheric balloons globally that can circumnavigate the world with different types of sensors and produce data, produce communications networks, all the things that satellites do with the added advantage that stratospheric balloons you can steer and stratospheric balloons you can station keep. And, um, and those are really important elements that satellites don't give you.

What, like, what's stopping you from doing that? I know you just raised more money, I assume. Part of this is like mass manufacturing these and, and yeah, I don't know, what are the next steps that you have to accomplish to make, make all that happen?

Yeah, there's a lot of technology that still needs to be developed. Uh, in particular, you know, we're, we're going to build, um, balloons that can fly for months and eventually years at a time. We don't have those today. So a lot of the fundraising we just took in is, is about R&D spend on, on building longer duration, small tactical balloons.

Is that like a materials problem?

It's a little bit of everything. There's definitely a materials problem. As you know, we make balloon— we make the first reusable balloons, uh, in history. And so we've had to innovate a lot on balloon materials, envelope materials, and manufacturing processes because the materials are different. Um, but yes, uh, permeability of the material is one of the limiting factors of long-duration flight. And so we're going to tackle that even harder moving forward. We have to build a suite of different payloads that are ultra lightweight that can do real-time downlink of data. So today, most of our cameras require that we recover the balloons, grab data cards, go process all the data. You know, the train to do that could be 3, 4 days before I could give you, Ashlee Vance, data from a balloon that we flew over your city. But then we have to build payloads that can instantaneously give you imagery or data and pair those with those balloons that can fly for a long period of time. But, but our goal is to launch a global constellation of stratospheric balloons for persistent, continuous remote sensing.

And, and when you are, when you are, I mean, have there been moments— I know you can steer it and you guys haven't had any accidents— have you like landed, you know, in a farm and some, some farmer has come across your payload? And I don't know, there must be some funny story that's happened along anyway?

There's quite a few. Let's literally, literally last Friday, uh, our balloon landed in a field out in Nebraska. And, uh, we put GPS trackers on our balloons and we land them in safe areas. So landed in a field. And then I'm sitting there watching mission control and the GPS device starts moving to the road and then it goes down the road and it goes to the parking lot of a high school. And I, and I know what high school it is because I have the GPS tracker and I called them., and the science teacher saw it land from the local high school, picked it up, brought it back to her class, and was like teaching her kids what a stratospheric balloon was with our payload and balloon. And they're really nice, right? Like they think it's really cool. We, you know, we show up and we talk to 'em about it and they give it back to us. But yeah, I have probably 100 stories like that though.

So how, like, how do you make sure it lands in the parking lot and not like in the high school?

Yeah, so we have procedures and rules for terminating balloons. We have have, uh, multiple systems that allow us to, uh, land them in target areas. Um, so number one, they're controllable descent vehicles. So it's not like weather balloons that go up and pop and you have no idea where they're going to land. We make a decision to click a button and say, okay, balloon, come back down to Earth now. And we have simulations where if we're going to click that button to bring the balloon back down to Earth, If we know within a certain distance exactly where that balloon is going to land, we see a little dot on our screen that says, if you click button now, it's going to land right here, right? So we will not terminate the balloon or bring it back down to Earth over densely populated areas or highways. So we look for open areas, public lands. Sometimes we land on private agriculture, but if we do, we always coordinate with landowners to go out and recover our systems.

Do you end up being able to return these back to home, or, or the future is, is always that you have to have a human grabbing it at the end like that?

Uh, yes. So when we get into the space of ultra-long duration balloon systems, right, they can fly for months or even a year. Um, you know, you can, you can steer it anywhere within that period of time. So the idea for our global constellation is that we will have several areas on Earth where we will recover balloons, right? There'll be, you know, uh, a zone in the United States where we're constantly, uh, landing balloons in much the same way aircraft land at airports. We may have a facility in Australia where we're constantly landing there, one in Europe, but we'll have like 3 or 4 areas where we navigate balloons towards at end of life and then steer them, uh, back down to Earth, um, and some, we're working on some really cool technology. We're also working on precision descent, uh, parafoils that can like very precisely land a balloon exactly where you want it to land.

Uh, that's what, yeah, it's like wondering if there's like a balloon drone hybrid or something, or you, you kick on propellers when you need them.

Yeah, not, not so much propellers because the, the, maybe on descent, but at altitude, the density of the air is just like not enough for us to do anything with, with that. But, but, um, but yeah, we, you know, we can build guidable, uh, parachutes just in the same way that a skydiver can steer down to a runway. We can do that with a balloon and a payload. And so that's where all the technology is heading. So again, in our future, there will be thousands of balloons overhead at any given time and balloon ports where we're, we're landing and launching systems from constantly. And we have, uh, the ability to precisely steer them back down to Earth.

And like, if you did have a global network of these, what, what is the absolute biggest first use case for that? It's, it's like weather monitoring or something like, like just getting this much. I, I know in the ocean, right, there's been a couple big efforts to put these buoys all over the planet. Saildrone has its, has its robot sailboats going around gathering data all the time, just with the hope that you actually start to understand our environment and our planet on a finer level for all sorts of reasons. But yeah, I mean, you know, as we all know, even with supercomputers and all these tools, weather prediction is still, is still a little iffy. I didn't know if that is the most obvious thing we'd be going after.

Yeah, all of our balloons will be armed with meteorological instruments. So, you know, one of the outputs will be weather data and weather forecasts from our own constellation of balloons. That, that will be a product that's offered. But the, you know, the core product will be supporting continuous monitoring. And I'm, you know, from like from a business perspective, I believe in the way to build a business is to be very specific about the problem that you're solving with the technology. And so when we first deploy a constellation, there's always a crawl, walk, run. We're not going to launch 5,000 balloons on day one. We're going to launch a regional deployment of our systems for one specific use case. That use case initially will be wildfire monitoring, right? Because we know generally very specifically where wildfires can start. It's, you know, we, you know, in the United States, Colorado, California, these, these areas in Australia, there's a wildfire problem, parts of Europe. So we can put regional constellations over those areas for that one specific use case. Excuse me. And then begin to build new use cases on, on top of that success.

Did they have you fly over the California fires?

Yeah, uh, we, we did. They, they didn't have us do that, but we, we, we did fly and we captured, uh, infrared data. It's, uh, it's on our website. It's pretty cool. You can see like a, a full map of high-resolution fire data over the Palisades Fire, and we gave it away for free. So anybody can go in there and download it.

And I mean, did the, did the various agencies end up start using it or they're still kind of oblivious that this exists?

We were careful in the way that we, I would say, distributed and marketed it because it's still in, it's in an R&D state for us as a company. And so what we didn't want to do when we flew over the fire was get in the way, right? If people are saving lives, I don't want them on the phone with me evaluating an experimental data product. I want to make sure that like the things that they have are extremely reliable. And our data is good, but it, you know, it's not fully commercialized yet. So yes, we shared it with them, but but, you know, we weren't pestering them to give us feedback while they were trying to handle the situation in Los Angeles. So we're engaged with CAL FIRE, we're engaged with the state of Colorado. They all, you know, they all have access to the data, but it was not being relied on in real time to support the effort.

Like when you talked about continuous monitoring, and I mean, if I'm thinking of continuous monitoring of the globe and who might want that, I mean, is that like, Is that first and foremost a military application or that's a, uh, something else? Um, yeah, I, what, what's the thing in there?

Yeah, no, I think, I think it's really important that the, the data we produce from this constellation is available to anyone that wants it. Um, so we will not launch constellations of, of balloons, uh, specifically to, to cater to the US Department of Defense and sell them data. That, you know, we want to support continuous monitoring use cases that are good for the world and are humanitarian in nature. And that's the way that we'll build that business. So the short answer is no, our customer will not be the Department of Defense for continuous monitoring or intelligence applications. Now, you know, like we talked about earlier, we sell hardware to the Department of Defense and they can operate different pieces of hardware and systems themselves. But our constellation will serve commercial use cases and that data will be available to anyone.

Okay. Yeah. All right, well, I hope, you know, people enjoyed this walk into a, I'm trying to use the show to take people into different, you know, worlds and universes they might not get to experience usually. And even though I don't work there anymore, people should go check out the Colorado episode of Hello World. They can see your balloons in action We go, we actually got to go launch one and dig in to all the old software. We'll obviously have to go shoot a new video with you guys now to, to replace that one. But yeah, it's been, I don't know, this is funny. I think I'd met you just, you were doing your job pitching, pitching stories and, and then I got hooked, man. Not just because you and I think I've always got along, but but because this— I just find the technology really, really fascinating and different. And, um, so I, you know, I thank you for being my guide all these years through Balloonland.

It's been fun. Yeah, I didn't even notice. It's got to be almost a decade now, if not a little bit less. But, um, but yeah, it's been, it's been fun, and we've got a lot more work to do, so we're excited.

So like, when I finish my next book, can we Like that, you could take that up, right? Can we do— I'm trying to— I, I want to be your new chicken sandwich.

Oh, like literally bring it to the street anytime? Yeah, you know, we can.

Yeah, yeah.

I, I don't know that you have the budget that, that KFC probably had to get one of those in the sky, though I may be wrong, you know. Maybe you've sold a book to everyone on Earth. I hope so.

Well, I don't know, if everyone listening to this would just, uh, sign up for a subscription, we could get We could do this, people. We can, we can get a book, but to Stratosphere.

We set some hops up the other day. You have to check that out. We got some Stratospheric beer. So, uh, we'll get you a beer when you come out here too.

That feels like a very Colorado thing to do.

It is.

Yeah. Um, all right, Andrew, thanks so much for your time, man. I appreciate it.

All right. Thanks, Ashlee Vance.

Good talking. This episode was hosted by Hosted Andrew Huberman. by me, Ashlee Vance. Our guest today was Andrew Antonio. Core Memory is produced by me and David Nicholson. Our theme song is by James Mercer and Jon Sorlen. And today's episode was edited by Jon Sorlen and Jake McPherson at Sutcut.