High altitude balloon company World View will not go public

The high altitude balloon company World View has ended its negotiations, begun early this year, with a venture capital investment firm to merge and make its stock public.

In a Nov. 17 statement, World View and Leo Holdings Corp II announced they were canceling plans announced in January to merge. The decision to end the merger was mutual, the companies said.

The companies did not give a specific reason for calling off the deal. “Over the course of 2023, World View received strong interest from potential investors,” the companies stated. “However, given challenging market conditions, World View and Leo jointly determined that it was the best course of action at this time to not proceed with their previously announced transaction.”

There could be a lot of good and bad reasons this deal fell through. Mostly likely World View officials saw the generally negative consequences experienced by other space startups that went public in this manner in the past few years, and decided it better to hold off.

Spanish court indicts two high-altitude balloon companies for stealing from third

In a legal battle between the three Spanish high-altitude balloon tourist companies (Zero-2, Halo, and Eos-X), a court in Spain has indicted the latter two for stealing trade secrets from the first.

The case stems from Zero 2 Infinity’s allegations that the people hired to raise money for its space tourism business established two competing firms based on Zero 2 Infinity’s intellectual property.

After asking for extensive documentation to share with potential investors, some of the individuals indicted “changed the logo in the presentations and managed to raise 1 million euros for a company that was just a website with some” computer generated imagery, Jose Mariano Lopez-Urdiales, Zero 2 Infinity founder and CEO, told SpaceNews. “They thought they could do that because Zero 2 Infinity was in financial distress, in part because we were expecting that 1 million euros to arrive.”

…The law in question carries potential penalties “of imprisonment from three to five years” if the secrets in question were “disseminated, revealed, or transferred to third parties” in addition to fines, Spanish attorney Leonardo López Marcos, co-founder of the International Legal Center for Space Sustainability, said by email.

One of the companies, Halo, apparently used the fund-raisers as a go-between so that it never had any direct links to the original company, Zero-2. Of the three companies, Halo has now done the most test flights. Whether this ruling will force it to shut down remains unclear.

SuperBIT balloon circling Antarctica snaps more high resolution astronomical pictures

Sombrero Galaxy
Click for full image.

The Super-Pressure Balloon Imaging Telescope (Super-BIT) that has been circling Antarctica for the last two weeks has now obtained two more more high resolution wide-field astronomical pictures.

The picture to the right, cropped to post here, is of Messier 104 (the Sombrero Galaxy). While the telescope cannot zoom in closer than this to such objects, it is able to get much wider and sharp pictures, covering an entire galaxy or nebula that ground-based telescope using adaptive optics (designed to counter the fuzziness caused by the atmosphere) cannot. Adaptive optics only work on very small fields of view, thus making it unable to observe some of the larger nearby astronomical objects like galaxies and nebulae.

If you look at the live stream of the balloon’s track, it has now almost completed its second circuit of Antarctica.

Engineers test fly prototype balloon for Venus

JPL engineers have successfully completed two test flights of a smaller-scale prototype balloon intended to fly in the atmosphere of Venus.

The shimmering silver balloon ascended more than 4,000 feet (1 kilometer) over Nevada’s Black Rock Desert to a region of Earth’s atmosphere that approximates the temperature and density the aerobot would experience about 180,000 feet (55 kilometers) above Venus. Coordinated by Near Space, these tests represent a milestone in proving the concept’s suitability for accessing a region of Venus’ atmosphere too low for orbiters to reach, but where a balloon mission could operate for weeks or even months.

“We’re extremely happy with the performance of the prototype. It was launched, demonstrated controlled-altitude maneuvers, and was recovered in good condition after both flights,” said robotics technologist Jacob Izraelevitz, who leads the balloon development as the JPL principal investigator of the flight tests. “We’ve recorded a mountain of data from these flights and are looking forward to using it to improve our simulation models before exploring our sister planet.”

The idea is an upgrade of two French-built balloons that flew on two Soviet-era missions to Venus in the 1980s and operated in the Venusian atmosphere for almost two days, flying 33 miles in altitude and traversing almost 100 degrees in longitude in that short time due to Venus’s high winds.

This project wants its balloon to survive more than 100 days. As it is presently in very early development, no launch date is even proposed.

Mirror comparable to Hubble’s ready for JPL balloon astronomy mission

engineers attach panels to the mirror's support structure.
Engineers attach mirror panels to the mirror’s support structure.

An Italian optics company, Media Lario, has now completed construction of the primary mirror — at 2.5 meters width slightly larger than Hubble’s primary mirror — to be used on a JPL balloon astronomy mission dubbed ASTHROS, targeting a December 2023 launch.

The ASTHROS primary mirror features nine panels, which are significantly easier to fabricate than a one-piece mirror. The bulk of the mirror panels consist of lightweight aluminum, formed into a honeycomb structure that reduces its total mass. The panel surfaces are made of nickel and coated with gold, which improves the mirror’s reflectivity at far-infrared wavelengths.

Once launched, the balloon will circle the south pole for up to four weeks, taking data on the gas distribution in several galaxies.

While that data will be worthwhile, the mission’s real goal is to test these technologies for future space-based astronomy missions. If this mission works, it will reduce significantly the cost and time necessary to make big telescope mirrors, while enhancing the robotic capabilities of such telescopes.

World View gets incentives to settle in Arizona

The competition heats up: The space tourism balloon company World View has obtained $15 million in subsidies from an Arizona county to base their operation in Tucson.

Today’s go-ahead from the Pima County Board of Supervisors represents an initial step toward setting up the tourist operation. The supervisors voted to invest $15 million, backed by future tax revenue, to build the spaceport. World View would lease the facility from the county over a 20-year term to pay back the investment. The facility would include a launch pad, headquarters building and manufacturing facility, World View said.

Increasingly it looks like Virgin Galactic’s SpaceShipTwo is being left in the dust as other companies move forward with their own plans.

A new company is now offering balloon flights to the edge of space for one third the price of a suborbital flight.

The competition heats up: A new company is now offering balloon flights to the edge of space for one third the price of a suborbital flight.

World View passengers will soar to an altitude of about 30 kilometers (about 100,000 feet) — far short of SpaceShipTwo’s intended 110-kilometer (68-mile) high peak. Inside the capsule there will be little sensation of microgravity. Rather, the whole point of the ride is the view. “You can be sitting up there having your beverage of choice watching this extraordinary spectacle of the Earth below you and the blackness of space,” project co-founder and Paragon president Jane Poynter told Discovery News. “It really is very gentle. You can be up at altitude for hours, for days for research if you need to be… I think we have the opportunity to give a really, really incredible experience to people — and for a lot less than most of what’s out on the market right now,” she said.

Space tourism — in a balloon.

Space tourism — in a balloon.

A newly successful test of a balloon could allow paying human customers to enjoy stunning Earth views and the weightless astronaut experience by 2014. The test balloon carried a humanoid robot up to an altitude of almost 20 miles (32 kilometers) on Nov. 12 — just a few miles shy of where skydiver Felix Baumgartner leaped from during his “space dive” in October. Startup Zero 2 Infinity wants to eventually offer hours of flight time for space tourists to do whatever they want in a near-space environment.

Ticket prices are $143K. And they have a list of customers who have already plunked down deposits.