Red Balloon launches VISTA for India’s near-space layer

At Vijayawada’s Indira Gandhi Stadium, a balloon rose on May 27 carrying more than gas and instrumentation: it carried Red Balloon Aerospace’s plan to give India a new testing ground between aircraft and satellites. The company’s VISTA super-pressure balloon tested core subsystems that will also be used in HELIX, its planned autonomous stratospheric airship for persistent, long-endurance operations.

The gap is practical. Payload developers in India need near-space conditions before sending hardware to orbit, but the few available facilities are oversubscribed and can bring long waitlists. CVS Kiran, a former scientist at the Vikram Sarabhai Space Centre and former vice president at Skyroot Aerospace, co-founded Red Balloon in 2025 after seeing room in the altitude band between aviation and satellites. The company defines near-space as the stratosphere, 20 km to 50 km above Earth.

Red Balloon is building three platforms as one modular family. VISTA is the balloon already flown; ALTIS, a tethered aerostat, is being prepared for flight; and HELIX is the airship at the centre of the programme. The startup says it designs its ultra-thin envelope film and reinforcing structure in-house, while also developing common avionics, navigation, communications, payload interfaces and mission software. That shared architecture is intended to let systems tested on one platform feed the others.

The proposed uses range from communications and V2X — vehicle-to-everything connectivity — to disaster response, remote connectivity and domain awareness. Commercial customers can use a rideshare model, carrying multiple payloads on one mission, while government applications could include sovereign connectivity, Earth observation and disaster response. Red Balloon operates a facility in Vijayawada and plans a larger extension; international business-to-business customers are expected to fly payloads soon.

So what changes in concrete terms? Indian teams could get another route to test payloads and develop near-space missions without relying only on scarce facilities, while customers could share a flight rather than occupy an entire mission. But Red Balloon is still building flight heritage across VISTA, ALTIS and HELIX. The company is bootstrapped and planning a funding round, and its claim that the mission placed India among five countries with indigenous hydrogen-powered stratospheric balloon capabilities comes from the company; no independent test results are cited here.