ALTADENA, CA – Global Aerospace Corporation announced today that a decision has been made by the NASA’s Institute for Advanced Concepts (NIAC) to fund the second year of the Phase II contract to develop a revolutionary concept for networks of stratospheric balloons. Constellations of superpressure balloons can help scientists and meteorologists study many major environmental and weather prediction problems. Tropical atmosphere circulation, global radiation balance, and polar ozone depletion could be studied from a global or regional network of instrumented balloons. These networks could assist in pollution monitoring, weather and hurricane forecasting and tracking, and global circulation studies. As the cost of satellite operations continues to increase, the need for less expensive and more efficient in situ systems for some observations becomes more apparent.