The 2019 flight was not a one-off for Professor Wu and his staff. The Eagles Men Aviation Science and Technology Group, or EMAST, a Beijing-based firm that Professor Wu co-founded in 2004, has claimed a sequence of different successes for them.
Advances in high-altitude balloons held out the potential for “excessive decision, long-lasting, steady communications, reconnaissance, navigation and different companies,” EMAST said on its official WeChat social media account in 2017.
In 2019, Professor Wu and his staff “acquired a sign from between earth and close to house” for the primary time, EMAST mentioned. The corporate didn’t clarify what sort of indicators had been concerned, nor whether or not the step was linked to the “Cloud Catcher” flight of that yr or one other airship. The company’s website has been offline not too long ago, however cached information of its internet pages can still be found online.
In 2020, a Chinese language balloon made a full circumnavigation of the globe and was safely retrieved, a pioneering feat, EMAST mentioned. Within the following yr, the staff operated two of the balloons within the skies concurrently, a primary for the venture.
In 2022, the cached EMAST web pages say, Professor Wu and his staff both launched or deliberate to launch — the Chinese language wording on the timing is unclear — three high-altitude balloons within the air on the identical time to type an “airborne community.” The last word aim, the company said, was to create an airborne indicators community in China utilizing stationary balloons floating at the very least 80,000 ft excessive.
It likened the planned network to Starlink, the system of small, low-orbiting satellites operated by SpaceX. Starlink has supplied communications assist to Ukrainian forces combating Russian invaders. By 2028, EMAST mentioned, it hoped to “full a world near-space data community,” however didn’t elaborate on what that meant.
There was no public corroboration of Professor Wu’s claimed successes with high-altitude balloons. His accessible scientific papers don’t describe any of these feats. Nonetheless, Professor Wu is a extremely awarded scientist whose views carry official weight.
