Editor's note: The battle of "near space" has begun... When China sent a surveillance balloon over the U.S. a few years ago, it sparked the realization that the war in space has begun. Today's Masters Series is adapted from the February 23, 2023 issue of the Stansberry Digest and the January 2025 issue of Stansberry Venture Technology. In it, editor Dave Lashmet explains how "near space" offers the next wave of investing opportunities...
Look to the Sky for the Next Investing OpportunityBy Dave Lashmet, editor, Stansberry Venture Technology Chase Doak wasn't sure what he was seeing... There was a white circle in the sky above his Billings, Montana office. "It looked like a big white orb," Doak said. At first, Doak thought it was a star or planet. But this was happening in broad daylight. Then he thought it might be a moon. But the object was too small. His next thought was an extraterrestrial craft. "I'm a skeptic, but I had to sort of consider the possibility that that's exactly what this was," Doak said. "I couldn't identify it. It looked like nothing I had ever seen before." Doak's photos of the object went viral... and the U.S. government soon issued a statement: It was a high-altitude Chinese spy balloon. 
The balloon had entered U.S. airspace over Alaska on January 28, 2023. Then it floated across Canada and into the lower 48 states – down to Billings.
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Over the next few days, Americans watched the balloon float across the U.S. to the coast of South Carolina – where the U.S. Air Force shot it down. The Navy was there to recover it at the end of a long "kill chain." The 200-foot-tall balloon was filled with surveillance gear – including cameras, antennas, and a huge solar panel. After the balloon was shot down, the government was able to track its path all the way back to its launch site in China using satellite images. The map below was created based on those images... 
So China couldn't deny that the balloon was its surveillance gear. And finding the launch site meant the U.S. could move its "kill chain" into the Pacific Ocean. That's why you haven't seen more Chinese balloons over the U.S. Hot-air balloons are a simple piece of technology. Hot air makes them go up. And when the air is colder, they come back down. At the time the spy balloon was likely making its way across Canada to the United States, based on NASA's stratospheric wind tracker, the region was facing an incredible cold streak. In Winnipeg, Canada, temperatures on the ground had fallen to minus 26 degrees Fahrenheit on January 27. Even farther south, Great Falls, Montana hit minus 12 degrees the next day. With such cold temperatures, the balloon evidently descended to about 60,000 feet. (Balloons like this one typically float out of sight at 80,000 to 120,000 feet, or even higher.) Once it dropped, passengers on a commercial airline flight made the first reported sighting. Soon afterward, the U.S. began tracking the balloon. From Montana, the spy balloon moved across the U.S. at the speed of the wind, passing over Missouri on February 3. That's when a U.S. Air Force pilot took this photograph... 
This picture is from a U-2 spy plane, which has a maximum altitude of 80,000 feet. And rumor has it, we shot down this balloon at 80,000 feet the next day over the South Carolina coast, using a missile fired from an F-22 Raptor fighter jet. It was a perfect shot, really – it clipped the bottom of the tear-dropped helium envelope, all the gas escaped, but the payload of solar panels and electronic eavesdropping equipment remained intact as it fell into the Atlantic Ocean. Here is another cool picture that is relevant to this story... You can see these layers of sky way above Earth here (and a silhouette of the Endeavor space shuttle)... 
The red bit with the clouds is called the troposphere – it's where our weather is and where passenger jets fly. Above that in white is the stratosphere. The light blue is the mesosphere, and then we hit space. Technically, both the Earth's stratosphere and the mesosphere above that are not yet in "space," as they are less than 100 kilometers (that's 62 miles and about 330,000 feet) above the Earth. It's "near space"... But it's a careful balance. The U.S. has plenty of low-Earth orbiting ("LEO") satellites as close as 100 miles above the Earth, and small ones might come as close as 75 miles. If we shoot down Chinese spy gear while it's in our stratosphere, China might claim the right to shoot down LEO satellites in space if they cross Chinese territory. To most investors, these might seem like otherworldly concerns... But the truth is, this region of near space is a prime target for one of the biggest opportunities of 2026. And folks who pay attention could profit from the big winners. Good investing, Dave Lashmet
Editor's note: Investors are turning their attention to the upcoming SpaceX IPO. But Dave says that the biggest opportunities lie in the smaller companies supplying critical communications technology. And we're only in the early stages of this breakthrough. Dave believes that space-based communication could be comparable with the Internet in its infancy. To learn more, click here. |
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