Ethan Thornton

speaker

1,249 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard Aug 2026 last heard 4 Aug

Ethan Thornton’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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recordings per month · last 12 months

Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Aug 2026 with 1.

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It's probably the clearest example.

So like balloons are kind of weird, but they're really, really cool.

And that they are at very high altitude and on radar, they're very hard to see.

And they're very cheap.

To shoot a balloon down, we've taken Stratus up to like 120,000 feet.

To shoot this thing down, it's like a few thousand dollars to put up.

Could be a lot cheaper as we hit rate manufacturing.

To shoot it down is hundreds of thousands of dollars.

So you'd use a big surface-to-air missile, like S-300, S-400 Russian missile.

Yes, hundreds of thousands of dollars being generous, assuming they design a better missile to take these things out.

And folks who are very deep in defense will hear me say this and will think of a bunch of other ways to shoot this thing down.

I promise we've thought about those and hardened against those.

It's a very hard thing to shoot down.

And then you carry basically sensors and communications.

A freaking balloon, dude.

Like, you know, this is old, old technology.

Weirdly enough, though, this has been the hardest thing we've ever engineered as a company.

The stratosphere likes to kill things.

You want a really cheap, really reliable system.

We had to design our own plastic for the strategic version of the balloon.

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