The 2019 flight was not the only one for Professor Wu and his team. The Eagles Men Aviation Science and Technology Corporationor EMAST, a Beijing-based company with which Professor Wu co-establish in 2004, brought a series of other successes for them.
Advances in high-altitude airships have created the potential for “stable, long-term, high-resolution communications, reconnaissance, navigation, and other services,” EMAST said on its official WeChat social media account in 2017.
In 2019, Professor Wu and his team “obtained signals from Earth and near space for the first time”, EMAST said. The company did not explain what type of signal was involved, nor whether the step was related to that year’s “Cloud Catcher” flight or another spacecraft. The The company’s web site recently went offline, but cached records of its web pages can still be found online.
EMAST says that in 2020, a Chinese hot air balloon made a circumnavigation of the world and was safely returned, a pioneering feat. Over the next year, the team operated two balloons in the sky simultaneously, a first for the project.
In 2022, the cached EMAST web pages say, Professor Wu and his team launched or planned to launch — the Chinese word for time is unclear — three high-altitude hot air balloons in the air at the same time to form an “air network”. The last goal, the company saidis to create an aerial signal network in China using stationary balloons suspended at an altitude of at least 80,000 feet.
It’s like network is planned to Starlink, a system of small, low-orbit satellites operated by SpaceX. Starlink provided communications support to Ukrainian forces fighting the Russian invaders. EMAST says that by 2028, it hopes to “complete a global subspatial information network,” but doesn’t elaborate on what that means.
There is no public endorsement of Professor Wu’s claimed successes with high-altitude balloons. His existing scientific papers do not describe any of these feats. However, Professor Wu is a highly awarded scientist with officially valid views.
