Sky High in Sioux Falls
THE EROS CENTER IS NOT the only remote sensing entity of note in Sioux Falls. A company called Aerostar has been headquartered there for decades, manufacturing balloons that carry sensors of all kinds high into the atmosphere.
Aerostar started as a division of Raven Industries, a locally grown technology company founded in 1956, that became a major player in Sioux Falls. Its founders had worked together at General Mills’ Aeronautical Research Division in Minnesota, which developed barrage balloons in World War II, and made high-altitude surveillance balloons, some that went as high as 150,000 feet, for the Office of Naval Research into the 1950s.
Raven purchased the Manchester Biscuit Company’s signature mill building at the head of the falls in downtown Sioux Falls in 1961, as soon as it had stopped making biscuits. Raven continued its work pushing the limits of balloons there, as well as engineering plastic films for agriculture, and other work.
A plant was opened at the airport in Sioux Falls in 1966, to expand Raven’s balloon projects and production. In 1970 the company was the first to operate a powered aircraft inside the stratosphere. The Aerostar division was created in 1986 to focus on the balloon operations of Raven Industries, which by then had diversified further into agricultural automation.
In addition to its high-altitude blimps, balloons, parachutes, and research platforms for the Navy and others, Raven helped popularize recreational hot air ballooning starting in 1961, when it claims to have invented the modern hot air balloon, and by the 1980s was selling more than 200 of them a year.
In 1984 Raven became the supplier of balloons for the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade in New York City. Up to that point Goodyear had provided most of the balloons. Large balloons appeared for the first time in the parade in 1928, to replace the real circus animals that scared children.
Raven Aerostar fabricated many of the large and complex shapes in the Macy’s parade’s popular aerial fleet of giant copyrighted character balloons, including SpongeBob SquarePants, and a 50-foot-long Astronaut Snoopy balloon (at the same time it was making snooping surveillance balloons for the government). After 2019 Macy’s took over balloon production themselves.
In 2012 Raven Aerostar partnered with Loon LLC, part of Alphabet/Google, to develop a high-altitude communications network, to get more remote parts of the world onto the internet. While that partnership ended, with Loon folding in 2021, Aerostar’s steerable high-altitude balloons have proven to be effective for localized intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance (ISR) applications, such as in the battlefield or along borders.
In 2021 Raven Industries was purchased by Case New Holland Industrial (CNH), a multinational maker of agricultural machinery, interested in Raven’s precision agriculture technologies, and its autonomous machinery. Other divisions were sold off.
Aerostar was acquired by TCOM, a company that leads the “lighter than air” industry, making balloons, blimps, and aerostats used in persistent surveillance situations, including the tethered aerostats along the US/Mexico border. Aerostar continues to exist as a division of TCOM, with new headquarters in the expanding suburbs of Sioux Falls.
The company is currently marketing systems for ISR, which use high-altitude balloons to carry sensor gear, radar, and communications equipment high enough to be invisible, and out of harm's way, up to 90,000 feet. This is higher than most aircraft can fly, and also provides maximal over-the-horizon line of sight, for observation and connections between communication points, including multiple balloon nodes.
Constellations of Aerostar balloons can be deployed to operational areas using the consistent winds of upper altitudes, aided by AI-enhanced weather predictions. Once in the area, balloons can move around to exact locations, with on-board motors, and loiter for months at a time.
Awareness of balloon-borne sensors increased following the highly publicized discovery of a Chinese spy balloon meandering across the continental USA in 2023, carrying a sensor payload as big as a couple of school buses. A high-flying U-2 spy plane was dispatched to take a look at it, then it was shot down by the Air Force off the coast of South Carolina, above shallow waters, where its equipment was recovered and analyzed at the FBI’s labs in Quantico.
Some of the smaller balloons spotted around the country at that time of heightened awareness belonged to Aerostar, which launches up to 200 flights per year over the USA, mostly to test devices, or to conduct research for customers, including earth scientists at universities and government agencies.
Weather balloons and hobbyist balloons with small payloads are launched all the time, and fly into the stratosphere, eventually landing at places known and unknown. In World War II the Japanese sent thousands of incendiary bombs carried by balloons across the Pacific, landing in hundreds of places in the interior of the USA, mostly without incident. This is nothing new. What’s new is that we are getting to know what is possible at the limits of ballooning. And Aerostar is helping us get there. ♦
