There have been satellites, rockets, space shuttles and space stations orbiting the globe for half a century now.

On the other hand, there is a region of the atmosphere that’s barely been touched. A handful of Colorado Springs companies and organizations are eyeing the stratosphere — a band of the Earth’s atmosphere that begins at about 60,000 feet and reaches up 30 miles above the surface — as a resource that offers many of the advantages of space at a much lower cost and with far more flexibility.

To help get this stratospheric industry off the ground, the Springs-based Rocky Mountain Technology Alliance is organizing the nation’s first High Altitude and Near Space Conference beginning Monday in Englewood, to bring together business, military, scientific and emergency management groups with an eye on the sky.

“The whole reason we’re doing the conference is we think it offers huge economic potential,” said Michael Semmens, chairman of the Rocky Mountain Technology Alliance. “How big, I don’t know, but it can be very, very large.”

To establish a beachhead in the stratosphere, companies have to build a vehicle that can get there and stay there. The technology is called HALE — “high altitude, long endurance.” They’re serious about the “endurance” part: Boeing is working on a vehicle that could stay aloft for five years at a stretch, although most developers are shooting for a more modest several months.

The idea is that if you can keep a vehicle up for weeks or months or years at a time, and give it enough engine power to fight the relatively mild stratospheric winds and stay in place over a spot on the ground, then you can use it like a satellite for communications or surveillance.

Even better, you can launch that high-altitude vehicle in a matter of hours, to cope with a natural disaster or provide surveillance in a new area, and at a price that’s a fraction of a rocket launch. Then, if there’s a problem or once the emergency passes, you can bring the unit down and save it for later.

The military potential is enormous, but there are also potential markets in emergency management, border patrol, environmental and scientific monitoring and telecommunications.

“Just use your imagination,” said Charlie Lambert, CEO of SkySentry, one of two Colorado Springs companies pursuing near space. “Once these things are up and running, the uses are going to be boundless.”

With the military know-how in Colorado Springs and the space industry in Colorado, our region could be a leading player in high altitude, said Ron Oholendt, president of Global Near Space Services, the other local company.

“This really can be the center, the hub, of the United States for this kind of technology development,” Oho-lendt said.

Mark Volcheff, executive director of the Springs-based Colorado Homeland Defense Alliance, said that’s the idea behind the conference.

“I think this conference plays into a sweet spot of an area that’s not covered well in other parts of the country,” he said. “This is going to be a growing, growing industry.”

Global Near Space Services was founded in 2006 and has 15 employees. The company has developed an aerostat — a tethered blimp that operates at low altitudes — to test its unique airfoil shape. It’s looking for customers for the aerostat, used in surveillance and research, while it works on a high-altitude version that can stay aloft for up to four months.

“With our technology, we can provide much greater capability than any aerostat that’s flying,” Oholendt said.

SkySentry is designing its own HALE craft using a different approach (which Lambert is keeping under wraps for now), while it operates a third-party aerostat as a technology testbed and works on communications and surveillance problems for clients.

SkySentry was founded in 2004 after Lambert retired from the Air Force. The company has 10 full-time and 10 part-time employees.

It’s not just small companies that are chasing high altitude, however. Giant firms such as Boeing, Lockheed Martin and Raytheon are building their own HALE vehicles.

Although those companies are spending hundreds of millions on the technology, small, nimble companies can still lead the way, said Bentley Rayburn, a retired Air Force major general who is helping to organize the conference.

Consider the Predator unmanned aerial vehicle, Rayburn said. Those vital pieces of equipment are built by a small company (General Atomics) that’s succeeded in a field crowded with giant defense contractors.

“There’s always going to be plenty of room for small companies,” he said.

The rewards are big, but so are the challenges.

Near space isn’t new — U2 spy planes have been up there since the 1950s, and weather balloons longer than that. These days, Global Hawk surveillance drones prowl the upper reaches of the sky, but can stay aloft for only 36 hours at a time.

If it were easy to put a blimp or a plane up there and keep it there, it would have been done long before now.

In many ways, the stratosphere is trickier territory than space. A HALE vehicle needs enough lift to stay aloft in tenuous air. It has to deal with huge temperature variations. It has to have a source of power that lasts for weeks, months or years, day and night. It needs enough engine power to stay in place. It needs a payload capacity large enough to be useful and operating costs low enough to be attractive.

“The physics are very unforgiving up there,” Lambert said. “You can’t afford a gram of extra weight in the stratosphere.”

Most HALE developers, including Global Near Space Services and SkySentry, believe a helium- or hydrogen-filled airship is the most promising approach, while others, including Boeing, think an ultra-efficient aircraft can do the job. All of the vehicles are designed to be unmanned and remotely operated.

Both local companies think they can build a working vehicle in the next two years or so.

“What’s interesting about a capability like this is, once you have it, people are going to find ways to incorporate it,” Semmens said. “The applications that can be put on a high-altitude device can really impact our lives.”

HIGH HOPES
The first High Altitude and Near Space Conference opens Oct. 19 in Englewood. Go to rockymountaintechnol ogy.org for information.