After China's spy balloon incident, the U.S. remains ahead in high-altitude balloon technology, but China and Russia are catching up with larger payloads and smaller, agile systems. China is shifting toward swarms of cheap balloons, since shooting them down costs $400,000 per missile, making defense economically impractical.
Okay, now that we've gone there, I mean, right after I went to visit you last time, we had the whole China spy balloon thing. I mean, yeah, what's the global state of balloon technology? And let's start there. Yeah, where does the US compare to everybody else when it comes to balloon efforts?
Yeah, I think we are the most advanced nation in the world. I can confidently say that from a stratospheric technology perspective. 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 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 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 going to 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 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?
