aerostat

I was just reading[1] how a similar aerostat is flown from Cudjoe Key, Florida by the DEA.

At 50k feet, you can cover a pretty large area with spot beams, and probably do aerostat to aerostat relays.

So I wonder if a hot air aerostat would have a longer longevity than the current helium based ones.

The additional height will give them better coverage than the radar aerostats you mention.

All the balloons shown in the article's image and embedded video are tethered aerostats rather than drone blimps.

The UAV or aerostat balloon broadband relay thing heavily hinted at in this article is one of the more amazing ideas.

It may become an issue where the increased strength required increases the cable weight beyond the point where an cabled aerostat becomes viable.

I don't think getting things from Venus orbit down to human friendly aerostat altitude is going to be an insurmountable problem.

Each aerostat in the dog pod grid was a mirror-surfaced, aerodynamic teardrop just wide enough, at its widest part, to have contained a pingpong ball.

What about Geoffrey Landis' proposal to colonize the upper atmosphere of Venus by building aerostat habitats there?

"...then Bud made himself scarce, because the monitors - almond-sized aerostats with eyes, ears, and radios - had probably picked up the sound of the explosion and begun converging on the attack.

The system included larger aerostats called nurse drones that would cruise around dumping large amounts of power into randomly selected pods all over the grid, which would then distribute it to their neigh- bors.

What about very large, very long, aerostat facilities that are mostly huge electromagnetic cannon for launching robot hypersonic craft?

This was nothing more than a small propeller, or series of them, mounted in a tubular foramen wrought through the body of the aerostat, drawing in air at one end and forcing it out the other to generate thrust.

It is proposed here that in the near term, human exploration of Venus could take place from aerostat vehicles in the atmosphere, and that in the long term, permanent settlements could be made in the form of cities designed to float at about fifty kilometer altitude in the atmosphere of Venus.