The Weekly Debrief: DARPA Wants To Capture The Next Chinese Spy Balloon

Instead of facing a heat-seeking missile launched by a Lockheed Martin F-22 at nearly 60,000 ft., the next airspace-violating Chinese spy balloon could be captured in flight, allowing its undamaged, intelligence-collecting payloads and stratospheric navigational technology to be inspected by U.S. analysts. 

That is the goal of the newly advertised Capturing Aerial Payloads to Unleash Reliable Exploitation (Capture) project by DARPA. Instead of shooting down the next buoyant airspace intruder, DARPA wants to find a way to haul high-altitude balloons down safely from up to 75,000 ft.

Capture focuses “on the ability to down high-altitude systems at a time and place of our choosing to minimize collateral damage, maximize usefulness of the recovered payload, and minimize the cost of the response,” Kyle Woerner, DARPA’s program manager, told Aerospace DAILY in an emailed statement. 

The program is being managed through DARPA’s Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) program, which sets aside about $150 million out of the agency’s $3.8 billion budget for nontraditional defense companies to submit programs. 

The Capture effort skips the Phase 1 SBIR process and offers a direct-to-Phase 2 award. Such deals normally have a ceiling of about $1.8 million. The Capture effort is part of DARPA’s SBIR XL pilot, which raises the ceiling for Phase 2 awards to $4 million with an optional $500,000 enhancement. Although Capture falls an order of magnitude short of the funding for a conventional DARPA program, agency officials think it will be enough for a small company to demonstrate the minimal viable product of a Capture system for a high-altitude object. 

“If successful in a minimum viable program, DARPA may choose to further invest to mature such a technology, often with the support of our military service partners,” said Woerner, who also has managed DARPA’s Manta Ray uncrewed underwater vehicle program. 

The Chinese balloon shot down on Feb. 4 off the coast of South Carolina was estimated by Gen. Glen VanHerck, the commander of U.S. Northern Command, to weight “thousands of pounds.” The Capture program, however, is seeking solutions that could Capture a high-altitude aerial system weighing only 500-1,500 lb. 

But Woerner explained that the goals of the SBIR-funded project do not include demonstrating an operationally viable system. 

“DARPA does not necessarily create solutions that are ready to fully replicate and transition to the military services,” Woerner said. “Rather, DARPA’s mission focuses on rapidly retiring the most challenging risks of a specific problem, often seeking to find a solution to the hardest aspects that inhibit the services from pursuing a program of record.”

Any companies that respond before the Sept. 21 deadline face several technical challenges. Their proposed system must be able to capture an object at an altitude that can only be reached by a few of the most advanced aircraft types in the U.S. fleet, including the F-22 and the Lockheed U-2S. Then, the Capture system must take control of a potentially noncooperative object and do so “in a manner allowing for controlled descent for recovery near inhabited or otherwise currently avoided recovery areas,” according to DARPA’s solicitation.

The system also must be able to respond to “aerial systems of interest approaching or within any U.S. sovereign airspace” within hours of an engagement decision, the solicitation adds. Technically, that requirement means the system must be able to scale up to respond to any incursion over a vast area from Guam to Puerto Rico and the northern tip of Alaska to American Samoa. 

Another challenge is the capture method itself. In the past, the U.S. military has demonstrated midair captures by Lockheed Martin C-130s of film canisters dropped by satellites in orbit, and an inflight autonomous refueling capability by two high-altitude Northrop Grumman RQ-4 Global Hawks. In both cases, the objects were either cooperative or nonresistant, and took place tens of thousands of feet below the operating altitude of China’s spy balloons.  

“I don’t see high-altitude reconnaissance planes with all the complexities of flying so high being able to do the task,” said Luis Pacheco, the editor of StratoCat, which tracks high-altitude balloon technology. 

“I guess you first need to get the balloon down in a non-catastrophic way to a lower altitude on which you can use conventional aircraft (i.e. C-130) to catch the remains or the deflated bag,” Pacheco said. “Another approach could be some kind of ‘harpoon’ or similar device which could make the balloon burst and at the same time hook the bag to a big parachute to lower the descent.”