Questionable balloon over the Midwest

Posted by cms116508@reddit | aviation | View on Reddit | 5 comments

I can’t post a FR24 image, but for those of you that have FR, it is currently located north of Dodge City, Kansas, south of I-70. I discovered it yesterday between Canon City, and Colorado Springs. Its tracking starts over the Pacific Ocean. Nothing on Google other than sometimes NASA has ballon’s they can control, but nothing on this particular balloon. Anybody know anything?

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5 Comments

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jcla@reddit

It's a high altitude balloon registered to Aerostar. Here's the link to the flight path: [https://globe.adsbexchange.com/?icao=a2609d&lat=39.378&lon=-100.930&zoom=7.8&showTrace=2025-04-23&trackLabels](https://globe.adsbexchange.com/?icao=a2609d&lat=39.378&lon=-100.930&zoom=7.8&showTrace=2025-04-23&trackLabels) Aerostar acquired the IP from Google's Project Loon, which was testing these balloons as a controllable platform for internet relay, etc.. [Thunderhead Balloon Systems - Aerostar](https://aerostar.com/products/balloons-airships/thunderhead-balloons)

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railker@reddit

I thought Aerostar was always the contractor/manufacturer of the ballon portion, Loon/Google just partnered with them and handled the payload.

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jcla@reddit

They worked together on the development and then Raven Aerostar bought up the Google IP when they wound down the project. https://aerostar.com/news/raven-industries-acquires-intellectual-property-from-loon

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cms116508@reddit (OP)

That’s the one. Thank you.

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Nimbus3258@reddit

Aerostar is headquartered in SD. It is very common to see multiple balloons in the midwest as they are constantly testing products during the times of year the weather allows. They have a \*wide\* range of capabilities depending on what the balloon is rigged with: [https://aerostar.com/capabilities](https://aerostar.com/capabilities)