Earlier this month, a suspected Chinese spy balloon drifted over much of the continental United States before an F-22 military fighter jet shot it down off the east coast. The event has put a massive strain on the already fragile U.S.-China relations, with China maintaining that the errant balloon was simply collecting weather data. Shooting down the balloon, Beijing said, was an “overreaction.”
The incident has thrown an unexpected spotlight on stratospheric balloon technology. High-altitude balloons themselves are not new: In fact, there are upwards of thousands of balloons operating in the stratosphere every day, Near Space Labs CEO Rema Matevosyan explained in an interview with TechCrunch. But it’s not every day that one i …
