Tucson-based World View Enterprises says it will build and deploy a fleet of its Stratollite stratospheric balloon vehicles over North and Central America starting this summer.
World View is in final preparations to launch the integrated fleet of balloon vehicles — known as World View Orbits — which will offer customers high-resolution imagery and associated analytics products for a variety of uses.
Speaking at the Next-Generation Suborbital Researchers Conference in Broomfield, Colorado, World View President and CEO Ryan Hartman said the Stratollite fleet will begin launching in the summer time frame, with a build-up to full fleet operations expected in first half of 2021.
World View says it will provide high-resolution imagery using precision instruments provided by the company’s industry partners and suppliers, while images will be delivered to users via a secure data portal on the World View website.
The company said it can provide images with a ground sample distance — a measure of resolution based on the ground distance captured between each pixel of digital photo data — of 15 centimeters, or about 6 inches.
World View is in the process of adding a custom electro-optical sensor to provide higher resolution imagery with a ground sample distance of under 5 centimeters, said Matteo Genna, World View senior vice president of engineering and manufacturing.
Founded in 2013, World View initially planned to develop Stratollite vehicles to take tourists to the stratosphere and later shifted its focusing to development of unmanned research vehicles that can stay aloft for months at a time, for applications such as Earth imaging at the fraction of the cost of satellites.
The company, headquartered south of Tucson International Airport, has launched more than a dozen test flights, including some for paying customers, since 2017 and last October announced a record-setting, 32-day endurance flight.
World View was co-founded by former Biosphere 2 inhabitants and space entrepreneurs Taber MacCallum and Jane Poynter, former NASA associate administrator Alan Stern and former astronaut Mark Kelly.
Contact senior reporter David Wichner at [email protected] or 573-4181. On Twitter: @dwichner. On Facebook: Facebook.com/DailyStarBiz
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