- Kyiv has floated more than 1,000 cheap balloons into Russia as decoys, relays and now even launch platforms, with a balloon-dropped Hornet drone reportedly doubling its strike range to around 300km
- The DART missile drops from balloons at 12-18 km and deliberately kills its own navigation in the terminal phase, leaving Russian jammers with nothing to attack
- Prevailing west-to-east winds give Ukraine a near-monopoly on the tactic, even as Russia tries its Barrazh-1 relay balloon as an alternative to Starlink
Google might have written off its Project Loon endeavor, a goal of using stratospheric balloons as flying cell towers, due to financial considerations, but they’re back in an unexpected setting: a deepening front line between Ukraine and Russia.
That’s largely because Ukraine has cracked the economy with the business model Alphabet, Google’s parent company, couldn’t: a cheap, easy-to-use weapons platform that can’t be blocked or shot down at an affordable cost, while building up its threat to Russian cities far from the front lines.
DART is a Ukraine-deployed, balloon-launched missile system developed by the Ukrainian company Center of Innovative Technologies Program (CITP), which fires projectiles from the lower stratosphere at intended targets.
A smart ‘dumb’ missile approach by design
While most of the world continues to focus on better smart satellite or laser-guided missiles (or precision-guided weapons), Ukraine is taking a very different approach, and it may be a much smarter play given how it could play out.
The balloon-based DART missile launches ‘smart’ and relies on satellite guidance to aim and aim at a target, before cutting guidance entirely for the final 6 km of travel, relying only on its solid-fuel engine to reach the intended position.
The approach, while somewhat crude, renders Russian jammers completely ineffective, unable to draw a DART missile off target or ‘confuse’ it in any way. The target does not appear to be civilians or combatants, but rather to limit Russia’s ability to wage war by targeting infrastructure due to the missile’s function.
The DART carries a warhead of about 10 kg that disperses conductive graphite filaments, a small graphite bomb designed to short out electrical infrastructure. This also means that it may not need the level of precision that many other missiles do: power plants and electrical grids tend to spread out, making them much easier targets than alternatives.
The more impressive part may be that the balloons, which often cost as little as $200, can lure expensive S-300 and S-400 interceptors into action, using up far more expensive ammunition and batteries on the Russian side.
Ukraine is also a direct beneficiary of geography: winds across the front generally blow from west to east, allowing balloons from Ukraine to easily reach Russian territory, while Russians have to fight against the current and, as a result, often float back to their own territory.
While the DART remains uncodified by Ukraine’s military, it has already been showcased at trade shows, with Eurosatory’s defense exhibition outside Paris in June marking its first major outing. It also has allies and adversaries alike taking notice as the Ukrainian conflict continues to offer modern battlefield lessons.
The US Army has been evaluating linked drone detection and communications relay aerostats with a view to launching swarms of drones from them in the future.
The Russians, on the other hand, are investing in a different kind of drone technology: the Barrazh-1, a stratospheric relay balloon carrying a communications payload of about 100 kg, which it says is entirely domestically built and aims to offset the lack of Starlink terminals available to the country for battlefield data and Internet services.
Follow TechRadar on Google News and add us as a preferred source to get our expert news, reviews and opinions in your feeds.
