Flight Campaign Results and Prospects of High-Altitude Balloons for Low Cost Spacecraft Technology Testing

Zero-pressure and super-pressure stratospheric balloons are widely used, high performance platforms for scientific research and technology development. The complexity and cost of such platforms and of the associated ground infrastructure is such that they are typically operated by space agencies or large research institutions only. This paper deals with a much simpler and affordable variant of the High-Altitude Balloon (HAB) technology, i.e. the so called sounding balloons, which are nowadays available at very low cost from commercial vendors and freely operable. Although with reduced performance in terms of flight duration and payload mass, sounding balloons have an excellent potential as testing platforms for flight hardware in the near-space environment. The main goal of the work here reported was to create a low-cost near-space platform for experimenting and testing on telecommunication hardware in the ISM (Industrial, Scientific, and Medical) bands, namely 900 MHz (UHF) and 2.4 GHz (S-Band). In particular, the goal was to assess the electromagnetic noise in the ISM bands simulating the operational environment of a LEO constellation dedicated to IoT telecommunications. To this end, we set up a system based on a commercial, low-cost HAB. We report the design phase, the operative mission phase, and finally discuss the data collected throughout a fully successful campaign of five launches.