Scientists in New Mexico creating a ‘vacuum balloon’ that can travel ‘as fast as a commercial airliner’ with the goal to carry humans, drop deliveries and spy

• The ‘vacuum balloons’ would trump traditional helium or hydrogen balloons and could potentially carry objects in the air indefinitely
• Miles Beaux, a physicist at Los Alamos National Lab, told DailyMail.com that the craft could be used for transport, surveillance, and parcel delivery drones
• Beaux says that his research is still a couple of years from actually producing a floating ball

They’re balloons – but not as we know them.

Scientists at New Mexico’s Los Alamos National Laboratory are working on a ‘vacuum balloon’ with a hard shell that could eventually carry humans and travel ‘as fast as a commercial airliner’.

Miles Beaux, a physicist at the lab, told DailyMail.com in an exclusive interview that if his experiments are successful the craft could be used for transport, surveillance, and even for parcel delivery drones.

Beaux and his chemist colleague Chris Hamilton have been making small, hollow spheres out of a super-lightweight material called aerogel, then sucking the air out of them in an attempt to create a solid ball that is lighter than the surrounding atmosphere – allowing it to hover.

The ‘vacuum balloons’ would trump traditional helium or hydrogen balloons, which slowly lose their lift, and could potentially carry objects in the air indefinitely.

Patents filed for the potential craft contain diagrams that look intriguingly like tic tac-shaped UFOs encountered by Navy pilots in 2004, which hovered above the ocean and sped off with incredible acceleration.

But Beaux says that although he has made quick progress since beginning in 2019 and is confident of ultimate success, his research is still a couple of years from actually producing a floating ball – let alone a supersonic ‘tic tac’.

‘​​We have not managed to make something float yet. But we have tested vessels that are 34 times the density of air,’ Beaux said. ‘And we have shown a proof of concept for making vessels that are 10 times the density of air. So we’re within one order of magnitude of actually reaching air buoyancy.’

The physicist told DailyMail.com that he had dreamed of vacuum balloons ever since he first heard of the ultra-lightweight material aerogel.

‘They’re at least 98% empty space. So they’re mostly made of nothing. I always had the idea that maybe you could make one of these, with a density low enough that it would float in air,’ Beaux said.

At sea level and 59 degrees Fahrenheit, air has a density of 0.001225 grams per cubic centimeter. A common ‘lightweight’ solid material, carbon fiber, is 1.55 g/cm3, or 1,380 times denser, while many aerogels are around 0.02 g/cm3.

‘The only way to make a structure that would be less dense than air, is to have a shell of the material and remove the air from the inside,’ Beau said. ‘And so that’s what we explored with these projects.’

He compared the spheres filled with air to sunken ships filled with water.

‘They’re sunken vessels on the bottom of the ocean of air. And it’s only by removing the air from the inside of the vessel that they will float,’ he said.

The models Beaux has experimented with have been just a few inches wide, too small to float. But he has calculated that a basketball-sized sphere made from the aerogel polyimide and strengthened with a lattice of tiny strings will be enough to achieve liftoff at sea level.

He said a roughly 4.5 ft sphere would be needed for lift in the more rarified air at Los Alamos where the elevation is 7,500 ft above sea level.

The physicist is currently seeking funding to continue his research.

And though it is cutting edge science, the idea of vacuum balloons is far from new.

In 1670, Italian Jesuit priest Francesco Lana de Terzi published a plan for a flying airship, held aloft by vacuum balloons made of copper.

Beaux’s research is edging closer to making those antiquated plans a reality, opening the possibility of a steampunk-style future with vacuum blimps as a major mode of transport.

Helium, a gas used in conventional dirigibles, is in short supply. It is largely produced in just four countries: the US, Russia, Qatar and Algeria, and the price has rocketed from under $2 per cubic meter in 2020 to over $10 last year.

Once released in the atmosphere, it keeps rising until it floats off into space, impossible to recover.

Hydrogen is easily producible, but dangerously combustible – as most notably shown in the Hindenburg disaster of 1937, when a German airship caught fire while landing in New Jersey, killing 36 of the 97 on board.

Beaux said his vacuum balloon could eventually be used by companies like Amazon and Walmart, which have filed patents for floating warehouses and delivery drones.

He noted that gas-filled balloons last no longer than two years before sinking to earth, whereas a solid vacuum balloon could stay up indefinitely, making it perfect for scientific studies of weather, broadcasting of cell networks, or surveillance by spy agencies.

A Chinese helium spy balloon floated over nuclear missile bases in January before being shot down off the coast of South Carolina by US fighter jets.

The spy dirigible was swept along by winds in the atmosphere. But Beaux’s patent filed in June 2018 has a diagram with propellers for his theorized craft.

‘I really don’t have a good sense of how fast these could go,’ he said. ‘I know there are some industrial partners interested in reaching speeds that are comparable to commercial airliners.’

Spherical objects have been reported by military and intelligence officials around the world, and are the most common shape reported for UFOs according to the Pentagon’s All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO).

Reaper drones in Syria caught ‘metallic orbs’ on video published by AARO earlier this year.

Statistics on the office’s website say 34% of ‘Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena’ (the government’s term for UFOs) are spherical or orb-shaped.

In 2004, former top Navy pilot Commander Dave Fravor and his unit famously reported a white tic tac-shaped object descending 80,000 feet in less than a second, hovering above the ocean off the coast of Southern California, before shooting off at thousands of miles an hour.

‘It’d be hard for me to imagine that this technology could explain those things,’ Beaux said. ‘It sounds like these are more mechanical lift-based or action force-based lift mechanisms as opposed to buoyancy.’

One company, Aerospherical Systems, has hinted at an alleged ability to build flying orbs.

According to its website, their technology involves a ‘specialized sphere’ that spins at 22,000 times per minute, whipping the air around it to create lift, a technique called the Magnus Effect.

It is unclear whether these spinning balls are in use – and the company did not respond to a request for comment.

The mysterious firm claims on its site that since 2012 ‘the technology has been proven by use in military action, public sports venues, and governmental space agencies on 3 continents,’ but also says that it is still searching for funding to ‘support increasing sizes of systems, additional analysis equipment and more evolved simulation analysis.’

The site says that ‘Concept testing and engineering studies are conducted with computer simulation systems and real-world reduced-size builds.’

It also claims that Aerospherical Systems has patents ‘issued and pending’ – though there are no mentions of the firm’s name in the US patent database, Google’s international patent database, or international corporate registers.

UnmannedSystemsTechnology.com, a drone site affiliated with UK defense contractor BAE Systems, wrote about the technology in 2012.

‘Although Aerospherical Systems has developed the spherical aircraft concept to the point of feasibility, the firm now requires additional funding to build and test initial prototypes,’ the article said.