The 2019 flight was not a one-off for Professor Wu and his staff. The Eagles Males Aviation Science and Expertise Group, or EMAST, a Beijing-based firm that Professor Wu co-based in 2004, has claimed a sequence of different successes for them.

Advances in high-altitude balloons held out the potential for “excessive decision, long-lasting, steady communications, reconnaissance, navigation and different providers,” EMAST stated on its official WeChat social media account in 2017.

In 2019, Professor Wu and his staff “acquired a sign from between earth and close to area” for the primary time, EMAST stated. The corporate didn’t clarify what sort of indicators have been concerned, nor whether or not the step was linked to the “Cloud Catcher” flight of that 12 months or one other airship. The firm’s web site has been offline not too long ago, however cached data of its internet pages can nonetheless be discovered on-line.

In 2020, a Chinese language balloon made a full circumnavigation of the globe and was safely retrieved, a pioneering feat, EMAST stated. Within the following 12 months, the staff operated two of the balloons within the skies concurrently, a primary for the challenge.

In 2022, the cached EMAST internet pages say, Professor Wu and his staff both launched or deliberate to launch — the Chinese language wording on the timing is unclear — three high-altitude balloons within the air on the identical time to type an “airborne community.” The last word objective, the corporate stated, was to create an airborne indicators community in China utilizing stationary balloons floating at the very least 80,000 ft excessive.

It likened the deliberate community to Starlink, the system of small, low-orbiting satellites operated by SpaceX. Starlink has supplied communications assist to Ukrainian forces preventing Russian invaders. By 2028, EMAST stated, it hoped to “full a worldwide near-space info community,” however didn’t elaborate on what that meant.

There was no public corroboration of Professor Wu’s claimed successes with high-altitude balloons. His accessible scientific papers don’t describe any of these feats. Nonetheless, Professor Wu is a extremely awarded scientist whose views carry official weight.