- World View Enterprises is a startup based in Tucson, Arizona, that launches surveillance balloon-craft into the stratosphere.
- The company says its Stratollites, as the devices are called, can take photos with a quality of five centimeters per pixel. That's many times better than commercial satellites and good enough to detect a mobile phone in a person's hand.
- The company plans to start a new service this summer: send Stratollites on circuitous, weeks-long "racetracks" or "orbits" above North America and sell the data to oil, gas, government, and other customers.
- Ryan Hartman, an uncrewed aerial systems expert who took over the role of CEO in February 2019, has made as his primary focus "operationalizing" the company's technologies into a business.
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This summer, an Arizona startup will begin floating giant yet unseen surveillance balloons into the stratosphere to track across and photograph sections of North America for weeks at a time.
The quality of photos should be high enough to detect objects as small as a cell phone, and possibly a cracker, in the palm of a person's hand. And as these balloon-craft beam down their valuable data, the company plans to sell it to customers at competitive prices through an easy-to-use website.
That, in a nutshell, is the major new leg of business planned by the Tucson-based startup, called World View Enterprises. The company's high-flying, high-tech platforms — known as Stratollites— have been in development since 2012. The reusable devices are designed to study Earth's surface, and the things and activities upon it, with a resolution that's twice if not five to 15 times better than commercial space satellites can offer.
World View has launched one-off development and demonstration missions for years, but only recently began proving it can control where its Stratollites can float above Earth, and for extended periods of time. The latest test showed its balloon-craft can stay aloft for more than 40 days, and hover over a small area for much of that time.
That is something a satellite can't do — or an airplane, drone, or other high-flying technology, for that matter — and leaves a sizable gap for World View to exploit, says Ryan Hartman, the company's CEO and an uncrewed aerial systems expert.
"We can create a radically improved future for our customers," Hartman told Business Insider, "whether that be a commercial enterprise, whether it be a soldier operating in harm's way, whether that be a Customs and Border Patrol agent and trying to help keep our borders secure, or a US Coast Guard agent when they're trying to perform a search-and-rescue mission or stop the illegal transportation of narcotics in your country."
Here's how World View's technology works, and what Hartman (who took the helm just a year ago) has done to focus the company into what he hopes will be a fruitful and expanding business — perhaps one that will eventually launch tourists high enough to witness the blackness of space and the curvature of Earth.
World View opened its $15 million global headquarters in February 2017. The multi-acre campus is located amid the desert scrub of Tucson, Arizona, just a mile south of the city's international airport.
Right next door is the company's "spaceport." It's essentially a 700-foot-wide concrete slab set up to rig, inflate, and launch high-altitude balloon-craft.
The site is used to launch balloon missions into the stratosphere. This zone of our atmosphere begins at about 33,000 feet above sea level and ends around 164,000 feet.
Taber MacCallum and Jane Poynter, famous for spending two years inside Biosphere 2 in Arizona, are a married couple who cofounded World View in 2012. They did so with planetary scientist Alan Stern and former NASA astronaut Mark Kelly.
Sources: Business Insider
An early yet long-term goal of World View was to fly a roughly 9,000-pound pressurized flight capsule, called Voyager, to carry tourists on five-hour journey into the stratosphere.
Giant window panels would give strato-tourists a crystal-clear view of Earth, space, and the stars — and a minibar within arm's reach. Tickets were to cost $75,000 to $100,000 each.
However, after World View's board brought on Hartman in February 2019, he paused development on flying people to focus on World View's core and eminently more ready technology: Stratollites.
Crewed flight isn't entirely out of the question, though. "That's something that may come back online in the future, it's not been completely dropped," Hartman said. "It's just firmly on the back burner for now."
Under Hartman's watch, World View began racking up milestones toward demonstrating the commercial viability of Stratollites.
"When I was hired by the board, the charter for me was to operationalize what we're working on," Hartman said. "We hadn't done any station-keeping, we hadn't done any long-duration flights. We had the technology and development, but we hadn't really fleshed it out."
In October, World View announced its first more-than-30-day-long flight. By November, the company had flown a mission for 42 days and hovered it over two locations. Then in December it launched another mission, operating two Stratollites at the same time.
"The results speak for themselves. We've done multiple 30-day flights, we've done a 100 continuous hours of station-keeping in a 40-kilometer area," Hartman said. "We've been doing all of the capabilities of the Stratollite — we've been demonstrating those as a basis for going to market."
Like a satellite, the platform can be outfitted with hundreds of pounds of gear — stuff like cameras, radar, environmental sensors, location transponders, and communications equipment.
Towering arrays of photovoltaic cells, which World View calls a solar panel ladder, connect to each Stratollite and power its electronics.
A pointing motor orients the ladder so it's always facing the sun, providing enough energy to keep missions aloft for days or weeks and — in the future — possibly two to three months.
The ladder dangles from the end of a high-altitude balloon, and the Stratollite dangles from the ladder. Secondary balloons just above the ladder can inflate or deflate. This helps move the balloon craft up and down, steering it into or out of prevailing winds.
"If we want to go east, we just find the wind going to the east, and if we want to go west, we just change our altitude until we find one that runs to the west," Ron Garan, a former NASA astronaut who used to be the company's chief pilot, told Business Insider in 2018.
Dangling from the end of the balloon at 50,000 to 75,000 feet — what Hartman said is "the sweet spot" for a Stratollite — special cameras can produce images showing objects as small as 15 centimeters (6 inches) wide.
That's fine enough to detect a phone as a dot-like pixel in a digital image. But Hartman says this is a conservative baseline, noting some imagery can be 5 centimeters (2 inches) per pixel or better. That could pick up a Ritz-size cracker and show it as one pixel.
World View manages its missions through a control center at its Tucson headquarters. Staff there handle everything from launch preparations, real-time mission management, and data collection, all the way through landing and recovery.
Workers monitor screens that show altitude, temperature, wind velocity, and more to keep tabs on a mission.
Stratollites represent "a new category of vehicle," a World View spokesperson previously told Business Insider, because they fill a gap that other types of surveillance vehicles can't.
Satellites orbit Earth from hundreds of miles away and can cost hundreds of millions of dollars to design, build, launch, and operate. Drone flights are a closer-to-Earth option, but they can only operate for short amounts of time — and cost anywhere from $10,000 to $25,000 per hour.
Sources: Business Insider, RAND
But Hartman says the company's first focus is serving up imagery for mining, oil, construction, shipping, and other commercial industries.
World View already offers dedicated missions for companies willing to pay for them. "A customer could task us to go to an area and stay there for two days, as an example, and produce continuous coverage, or 15-minute imagery, or hourly imagery, or whatever their needs," Hartman said.
In addition to offering dedicated missions, World View plans to start a new service this summer: what Hartman described as continuous "racetracks" or "orbits" over North America. "Think of them as very long closed-route paths — a shape that is an oval or a circle or whatever," he added.
"We'll be providing continuous coverage over the Permian Basin, over the Gulf of Mexico, over the Southern Caribbean, over areas like the Panama Canal, and then the Pacific coast of Mexico, and then back over Southwestern US, back to the Permian Basin, and just keep doing that exact circle — just constantly," Hartman said.
The goal is to rack up loads of better-than-satellite image data and make it available to buy through a web portal.
Hartman said World View's ambitions don't end there, though: "We're designing a racetrack to be operated out of Alice Springs, Australia. We've not completed that work yet, but but we expect to be flying some of our systems out of Australia this year."
World View plans to operate five race tracks around the globe in the next few years, including South America, Southeast Asia, and Africa.
One that Hartman says he'd eventually like to see is a North Pole racetrack to monitor ice flows for — thanks to climate change — new shipping lanes. "Being able to provide that kind of information is going to be very important," he said.
A third arm of World View's planned business is defense and intelligence, and the company has already flown some classified missions.
It's not hard to imagine why: Stratollites are a portable, relatively cheap, easy-to-deploy, and hard-to-detect platform that can be loaded up with electronics, hover over a spot for weeks or months at a time, and autonomously fly back to a base.
World View's first racetrack is poised to provide information that authorities can use at the US-Mexico border and other points of entry. "Any border benefits from continuous monitoring," Hartman said.
"We're in conversations with entities like Department of Homeland Security," Hartman said. "We're making them aware of the work that we're doing and working specifically to better understand their [...] needs."
If World View can grow its businesses, the company will inevitably gain real-world experience — know-how that it can invest back into its early goal of crewed flight. But for now the company is looking to Virgin Galactic, Blue Origin, and others to solve bureaucratic hurdles associated with high-altitude tourism.
"There has not yet been a commercial tourist flight," Hartman said. "That market is still emerging — there's still a lot of regulatory work to be done, there's still a lot of safety work to be done."
Although MacCallum and Poynter both amicably left World View in 2019, their LinkedIn pages show they've founded a new company: Space Perspective. An illustration on the startup's website shows a stratospheric capsule interior concept.
It's not yet clear if the duo plan to work with World View in the future, or strike out on their own. "We are not quite ready to make a public announcement about Space Perspective," MacCallum told Business Insider in an email.
