STRATOSPHERIC BALLOON BASES IN THE WORLD

Holloman Air Force Base is located approximately 145 kilometers north of El Paso, Texas, and 43 kilometers west of Alamogordo, New Mexico. The landscape is of high desert country with an average elevation of about 1250 meters, and 300 square miles of mountainous terrain with peaks extending up to 9,000 feet Mean Sea Level (MSL). On its western edge is located the White Sands Missile Range (WSMR) which operated complementary for many of the missions conducted at Holloman offering a suitable open terrain to drop things.

The base occupies 24,153 hectares of land and houses 4,900 military, 870 civilian personnel, and is home to 380 members of the German Air Force.

On June 10, 1942 Alamogordo Army Air Field was established at a site six miles west of Alamogordo, New Mexico. Initial plans were set to use the base for the British Overseas Training whom hoped to train their aircrews over the open New Mexico skies. However, everything changed when the Japanese launched a surprise attack against the Hawaiian Islands on December 7, 1941. As the British cancelled the program, the US military saw the location as an opportunity to train its own growing air force. Construction at the airfield began on February 6, 1942 and forces began to move in on May 14, 1942.

During three years, Alamogordo AAF served as the training grounds for over 20 different groups, flying primarily B-17s, B-24s, and B-29s. Typically, these groups trained at the airfield for about six months, before heading to combat in either the Pacific or European Theater.

After World War II, rumors spread concerning the closure of the site, fueled by the fact that most operations had ceased. However, in 1947 the Air Materiel Command announced the air field would be its primary location for the testing and development of unmanned aircraft, guided missiles, and other research programs. The Holloman Air Development Center had born.

On January 13, next year the Alamogordo installation was renamed Holloman Air Force Base, in honor of the late Col. George V. Holloman, a pioneer in guided missile research.

The Balloon Branch at Holloman got its start in 1947 after the Air Materiel Command of the then Army Air Force awarded to New York University (NYU) a contract to develop and fly high-altitude balloons. In those times US authorities were aware of the fact that probably the Soviets were pursuing their own atomic bomb, so the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) started a study about long range detection of nuclear detonations throught the so called "Atmospheric Sound Channel". For this purpose they used balloons that carried low frequency acoustic detectors to the stratosphere, which would "hear" the compression waves generated by such a test. The codename of the secret program was "Mogul" and at first it used large trains of neoprene balloons and then switched to the innovative polyethilene balloons developed by General Mills Inc. of Minneapolis.

The firsts balloon launches of the program took place on early June 1947, under the guidance of a NYU team, and with support of the newly created Balloon Operations unit. One "service" flight performed on June 4th using several neoprene balloons failed soon after launched and landed in the ranch of Marc Brazel in New Mexico who found the debris the next morning making headlines across the nation that a "flying saucer" had crash. Thirty years later this happening will be known as the "Roswell Incident" becoming one of the cornerstones of the UFO myth. Several other missions followed during June that first ill-fated test flight, and on July 3 was launched for the first time a MOGUL mission using several polyethilene balloons in tandem.

Although the entire effort would probe not succesful in his primary goal, it boosted the development and testing of constant level balloons and paved the way to create one of the most active balloon launch sites in the United States for the years to come.

By 1948 the launches started to be performed by Air Force personnel, and the next year was officially organized the Balloon Branch as a subdivision within the Electronic and Atmospheric Projects section at Holloman AFB being operated by the Air Force Cambridge Research Laboratories (AFCRL). July 21, 1950 marked the start of operations for the branch with the launch of the first polyethilene balloon devoted to perform atmospheric sampling.

In those early years, the balloons launched from Holloman were part of a wide range of experiences that involved from their use as targets for missile tests to high-altitude missions that photographed the moon, the sun, and the stars. Another important research was developed in the field of the cosmic rays, using animals sent for long exposure times to the stratosphere in specially built sealed capsules, to asses how these particles affected their celular growing and descendence. This late project was carried out by the Aeromedical Field Laboratory (AMFL) and often this activity led to the transport of all the launch hardware to places located farther north to allow a better exposition of the test subjects to cosmic radiation.

In June 1951, Air Force Headquarters approved a project proposed by AFCRL to obtain more accurate data on high-altitude winds by using instrumented polyethylene balloons. The initiative carried out under the name of project "MOBY DICK" started at Holloman with early technological launches and later went to full scale with more than 500 balloons flown from several sites along the United States. As a spin off of the program a variety of new systems and launch techniques were developed and deep knowledge of wind patterns was gained. Of the hundreds of balloons launched by the Balloon Branch for "MOBY DICK", many have crossed the Atlantic Ocean and managed to reach remote places like Azores Islands, North Africa, Spain, England and Norway.

Although "Moby Dick" was widely recognized as a scientific project, another effort that used much of the information gained on wind patterns had a more secret twist: the development of a then secret high resolution photographic camera and several other items under "Project GOPHER". This was part of a strategic reconnaisance operation aimed to spy the Soviet Union called "Genetrix" taht used balloons launched from several cities of Europe. That massive and useless balloon invasion of the countries behind the iron curtain took place in early 1956. Holloman served as launch place for several flight test of "GOPHER" since August 1952 when Air Force terminated the original contract for the project with General Mills and transferred the operations to the Balloon Branch.

Another important project carried out at Holloman was "HIGH DIVE", a study of high-altitude escape systems. Under this initiative, the group assisted with dozens of balloon flights that carried life-sized anthropomorphic dummies to high altitudes where they were released to test different types of parachutes and to study the rate of spin that they acquired with conventional systems. Several of these launches were conducted from remote locations around the base to take advantage in different months of the prevailing winds to drop the Dummies inside the restricted areas of the WSMR.

By that time, AFCRL assumed within the Air Force program the overall responsability of all the development work in the field of ballooning, which become an important part of the activity carried out at Holloman AFB.

A singular milestone was set on 1956 when the balloon branch assisted 20th Century Fox in the making of the movie "On The Threshold of Space". Aside the guest appearance of Holloman personnel as extras in the film, a pair of balloon flights were performed with a dummy spherical gondola dubbed "Skylight" to obtain shots that later would be included in the movie.

As far as we know this was the only movie ever filmed that included stratospheric balloons as "main characters" of the plot.

Between late 50's and early 60's various projects involved the execution of manned balloon missions. Several low level flights to train personel were also conducted by the USAF as part of the effort of the "MANHIGH" project, whose third and last flight in 1958 was launched from Holloman.

The next year the base was the neural point of another manned program called "EXCELSIOR" which was a continuation of the "HIGH DIVE" effort but using instead of antropomorphic dummies a human pilot to jump from the stratosphere. The objective was to test a new parachute system developed by Francis Baupre for high altitude bailouts. After two more or less succesfull jumps in 1959, US Air Force Captain Joseph W. Kittinger (who also was pilot of the first "MANHIGH" balloon mission performed in Minnesota in 1957) stepped out from a open gondola at an altitude of 102,800 feet on August 16 1960, plummeting towards the ground for more than four minutes, before finally opening his parachute at an altitude of 18,000 feet setting a record still unbeated. No person had ever parachuted to Earth from a higher altitude.

Kittinger would return to the balloon flight a third time two years after "EXCELSIOR" jumps under the aegis of project "STARGAZER". It began in 1959 to study high-altitude astronomical phenomena from above 95 percent of the Earth's atmosphere, which allowed undistorted visual and photographic observations of the stars and planets.

On December 13 1962, Kittinger and the astronomer William White rose to an altitude of 82,200 feet from Holloman AFB. In addition to obtaining valuable telescopic observations, the flight provided useful information for the development of pressure suits and associated life support systems. Despite the success, the rest of the planned flights of the project were never materialized due to lack of funds, thus "STARGAZER" become the closing act of the high altitude manned balloon history: outside some private efforts carried out by civilians, no new flights would be ever attempted by any federal agency or the military.

1961 will see the first of the many changes of dependency within the Air Force, as the Balloon Branch including its test programs, facilities and resources became a part of the AFCRL's Research Instrumentation Laboratory. The list of experiments performed during those times by Holloman's balloon branch is huge so any intent to mention all of them would render endless this text, however one experience worth of mention was BANSHEE (acronym for Balloon and Nike Scaled High Explosions Experiments), a project aimed to determine the destructive potential of explosions at various altitudes as part of a program to develope an effective antimissile system. Balloons carried huge pentolite explosive spheres and instruments, to measure the blast effects at altitudes between 38.000 and 115.000 feet. The program required several developments including the reconfiguration of a M48A2 tank as payload launch vehicle to allow a safe place to stay for the personnel that handled the balloon trains in those missions that carried the powerful explosives.

Another singular part of the balloon activity at Holloman was devoted to test several space probes and capsules destinated to explore the planets of our solar system. These vehicles were released in ballistic flights from stratospheric balloons to study their reentry behaviour in an environment of similar density to the atmosphere of Mars or Jupiter.

This kind of missions started in the 60's with a first drop test of a nosecone similar to the one of the DISCOVERER XII spy satellite and continued through the following decades with projects like VOYAGER (Mars) , GALILEO (Jupiter) , VIKING (Mars), PIONEER (Venus) or programs like the PEPP (Planetary Entry Parachute Program) which studied the best way to decelerate a vehicle reentering from orbit, using a saucer shaped aeroshell. Most of the launches were performed from the Walker Air Force Base (renamed after 1967 as Roswell Industrial Air Center) to allow a safe descent at restricted space inside White Sands Missile Range.

A great amount of balloon flights were devoted to atmospheric sampling. One of the longer lasting programs on this field was Project ASHCAN established in 1956 by the US Atomic Energy Commission. It consisted initially in a single balloon-borne system to obtain air samples at certain altitudes to mesure radionucleotides that had been supposedly blasted into the stratosphere by nuclear tests conducted by the Russians, Chinese, and others. The Ashcan flights gathered dust from the stratosphere, providing experts with a vast amount of information concerning the capabilities and activities of the United States' adversaries.

Although from the start ASHCAN was operated by the Air Weather Service, in 1972 the Energy Research and Development Administration transferred responsability for the balloon operations to AFCRL's Aerospace Instrumentation Laboratory, starting to launch the ASHCAN balloons from Holloman AFB as well continued to support other flights for the project in several remote locations like Alaska and Panama.

Let's make a pause in the history of the balloon activities at Holloman AFB to make focus in the infrastructure available for the task along the time.

As occur with several other launch bases which where part or functioned inside military bases, there is no much detailed information available on the topic.

As far as we know for the balloon launches the branch counted with a specially built concrete rectangular area located close to the legendary high speed test track in the west side of the base which became the neural point of balloon operations.

The place is known as the Nenninger Site in honor of Maj. Richard L. Nenninger who died on April 7, 1970 as a result of the injuries received in an aircraft crash in the Sacramento Mountains, during a balloon recovery mission. A number of launches were also performed from the base runway itself and aditionally those missions which involved very sensitive payloads or explosives were launched from remote locations in the north boundaries of the base.

All operations were prepared, followed and controlled from the Balloon Operations Center, inside Building 850 in Holloman AFB. There were located the administrative offices, a big payload integration hall and all the balloon support instrumentation: telemetry, flight control, flight safety, data acquisition and display, inflight tracking, communications and navigation. Also the building counted with a complete weather station, machine shop, instrumentation lab, parachute shop, and a small altitude chamber. On regard mobile facilities the balloon branch counted with instrumented vans for radio command communications, telemetry and flight tracking, allowing the group to perform launches everywhere.

As can be seen in the pictures, there is a tendency to use big cranes as launch vehicles at Holloman operations. This has its origin in a then new launch technique developed by the Balloon Branch in the 50's to overcome unsatisfactory results with previous launch procedures.

In this new launch technique the payload is tied to the crane boom before inflation of the balloon and elevated with the crane. The balloon is then inflated and hold in place by means of a roller or spool mounted in a launch platform. The crane is moved down wind simultaneously with release of the balloon from the launch platform, and the payload released from the end of the boom by electrical cutting squibs. This technique evolved from a static type crane launch where the balloon was inflated before the payload is tied in then captured by the boom. Later developments included a vertical inflation with crane and a semi-crane capture system.

In the mid-1970s, the balloon program experienced some troubles having a large number of balloon failures. This situation caused the Air Force to seek a contractor to assume overall management of the operations. So, in 1976 the first major ballooning contract (valued at about $300,000 per year) was awarded to the Physical Science Laboratory (PSL) of New Mexico State University (NMSU) in Las Cruces which took control of the operations in fiscal year 1977. The addition of an external contractor proved a success as flight and mission failures dropped during the first several years of the contract.

Although still on those times the group was refered to as "the balloon branch" the official denomination was Air Force Geophysical Laboratory Detachment 1.

During the remainder of the 70's and the following decade, the amount of balloon flights performed at Holloman AFB decreased accompanying a global trend. Of these, several were devoted to military and defense programs. Remote sensing and detection was the most active field. Two examples of payloads flown on those years at Holloman were DUCKY and ABLE. The first one was an experiment devoted to make gravity measurements from a high-altitude balloon to verify global and upward-continued gravity models while the second was a developmental program that tested the needed technology for space lidar platforms to be deployed in future missions on the Space Shuttle or on a dedicated satellite.

Another remarkable experiment was BAMM (Balloon Altitude Mosaic Measurements) a program designed to make temporal, spatial, and spectral measurements of earth backgrounds in the infrared. It was commissioned by the Air Force Space Division to generate data in support of an advanced warning system being developed at the time. The spinoff of the program would be a sensor capable of characterizing the exhaust plumes of the thrusters aboard post-boost vehicles, a primary target for the infrared sensors of the proposed defense system.

Also during this time was continued the ASHCAN sampling program performing flights in a more or less regular basis until the termination of the effort in 1982. However, some additional flights were performed for very specific tasks. One os such missions was carried out in 1984 to catch traces of radioactive debris from the burnup of the nuclear powered russian satellite COSMOS 1402 destroyed in reentry over the South Atlantic Ocean in Febraury 1983.

In mid 80's, totally unconnected with the balloon activities at Holloman AFB, a spectrometer called GRAD (Gamma Ray Advanced Detector) was developed by a joint effort of the University of Florida, DARPA, and the Goddard Space Flight Center. It was waiting its turn to fly on a Space Shuttle mission, when two happenings would change its fate: the Challenger disaster in January 1986 and the apparition of the Supernova 1987A in the southern hemisphere skies in Febraury 1987. As a result of the unexpected mishap, the instrument -at the time completely qualified for spaceflight- was forced to stay in the ground undefinelly, while in the sky was developing a unique celestial event.

Not resigned to missing the astrophysical event of the century, the GRAD team quickly contacted the Air Force Geophysical Laboratory (NASA's National Scientific Balloon Facility was not an option as they would be very busy launching payloads from Australia for the same purpose) and asked if the balloon branch could manage the launch of GRAD under a stratospheric balloon from Antarctica.

After preliminary meetings between March and July of 1987 the challenging nature of that mission was clear: all preparations would be driven by a set of inflexible deadlines imposed by natural circumstances, meaning that the team would have only four months to get the instrument and flight gear developed, integrated, tested and loaded onto a C-l4l cargo plane scheduled to depart the United States for Antarctica on 13 November. A month later the experimenters and launch crew would arrive at McMurdo Station, and the first launch attempt would be scheduled for the first week of January. Leaving aside the busy schedule, the most important issue was that GRAD would be the first experiment using a balloon of that size in the white continent.

The launch site choosen was Williams Field Airport near McMurdo Station, instead of the original plan to launch from the Amundsen-Scott base at the south pole. The main reason was the better logistic support offered by that place. The transformation of GRAD in a balloon-borne instrument required several adaptations including the developing of a gondola to mount it and a novel pointing system to get the instrument aligned to the sun (assigned to the University of Florida), to design a solar power system for the gondola (New Mexico State University), to devise a method of tracking the balloon as it drifted out of range of Williams Field (Aerospace Corporation) and to create a telemetry system that would operate from an airborne LC-130 plane (assigned to AFGL). All parties had to ship their respective components to Holloman AFB by October 9 for integration and testing of the completed system.

With the support of National Science Foundation and its contractors that prepared staging and launch facilities in McMurdo and constructed a launch gantry to fit onto the bed of a Delta-3 vehicle, in December 16 the scientific team and launch crew set foot on the ice and started the integration phase of the missions seting up and testing all the systems while the GRAD instrument was prepraed for the flight. Aside several problems that arose due to the complexity of the task, the balloon was finally launched on January 8, 1988 and terminated 3 days later after traveling 1440 kms at a mean altitude of 34.5 kms.

Although shorter than expected the flight proved succesful detecting anisotropic features in the background and despite a full circle around the south pole was not completed, from the ballooning point of view the mission had set several milestones that paved the way to present Antarctic balloon launch capability. Also it was one of the highest achievements of the balloon group on the decade.

The years to come would see a sharp decrease in the amount of balloon launches as well several modifications that will change the face of the program forever.

In middle 90's as ocurred before, the balloon branch experienced a complete restructuration but this time also suffered a full relocation being no longer an independent group. The balloon program is now under direct managment of the Vehicles Space Experiment Integration, headquartered at Kirtland Air Force Base in Albuquerque, and under the umbrella of the Air Force Research Laboratory located at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Ohio. All balloon activities (both free and tethered) are enclosed in the Near-Space Access Program.

Their main facility is located on the west side of Kirtland AFB, and is known as the Aerospace Engineering Facility (AEF). It is devoted to space experiment integration, verification, and testing and is operated by the Air Force Research Laboratory's Space Technology Integration and Demonstration Division. The AEF houses a 60 foot tall, 4,500 squarefoot high bay laboratory for the assembly testing of all kind of space flight hardware (not only balloon-borne experiments); and count with a clean room, three environmental chambers, a thermal vacuum chamber, three vibration tables and a copper screen room to conduct electromagnetic compatibility/susceptibility testing. The facility also includes electrical and mechanical labs, and a machine shop for hardware fabrication. As occured in recent decades a contractor (Applied Technology Associates or ATA, a defense firm from Albuquerque, New Mexico) is in charge of the operations.

With all these changes and with the operative focus and main facility of the balloon projects in Kirtland AFB, only a few traces of the old balloon glory days are still present at Holloman AFB. The only remaining infrastructure for balloon operations at Holloman is the Nenninger Site that still is used for sporadic balloon launches. As far as we know, Building 850 is not in use anymore. It was abbandoned a few years ago and there are plans to demolish it in the near future.

Only a few flights per year are being done in a very irregular basis.

In 2012, after the record set by Felix Baumgartner on his stratospheric jump, the balloon branch received huge media attention as they were the team in charge of the balloon operations for the succesful feat.