Spy balloons that can see a phone in your hand will soon fly over North America. Here's how World View's technology works and what else its new CEO has planned.

Travis Deyoe, Mount Lemmon SkyCenter/University of Arizona

A ground telescope's view of a World View Stratollite balloon-craft floating in the stratosphere.

• World View Enterprises is a startup based in Tucson, Arizona, that launches surveillance balloon-craft into the stratosphere.
• The company says its Stratollites, as the devices are called, can take photos with a quality of five centimeters per pixel, which is many times better than commercial satellites and good enough to detect a mobile phone in a person's hand.
• The company plans to start a new service this summer: sending Stratollites on circuitous, weeks-long "racetracks" above North America and selling the data to oil, gas, government, and other customers.
• Ryan Hartman, an uncrewed aerial systems expert who took over the role of CEO in February 2019, has made as his primary focus "operationalizing" the company's technologies into a business.
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This summer, an Arizona startup will begin floating giant yet unseen surveillance balloons into the stratosphere to track across and photograph sections of North America for weeks at a time.

The quality of photos should be high enough to detect objects as small as a cell phone, and possibly a cracker, in the palm of a person's hand. And as these balloon-craft beam down their valuable data, the company plans to sell it to customers at competitive prices through an easy-to-use website.

That, in a nutshell, is the major new leg of business planned by the Tucson-based startup, called World View Enterprises. The company's high-flying, high-tech platforms - known as Stratollites - have been in development since 2012. The reusable devices are designed to study Earth's surface, and the things and activities upon it, with a resolution that's twice if not five to 15 times better than commercial space satellites can offer.

World View has launched one-off development and demonstration missions for years, but only recently began proving it can control where its Stratollites can float above Earth, and for extended periods of time. The latest test showed its balloon-craft can stay aloft for more than 40 days over a small area, though the long-term goal is 60-90 days.

That is something a satellite can't do - or an airplane, drone, or other high-flying technology, for that matter - and leaves a sizable gap to exploit in the Earth-observation and remote-sensing markets, says Ryan Hartman, the company's CEO and an uncrewed aircraft systems expert.

"We can create a radically improved future for our customers," Hartman told Business Insider, "whether that be a commercial enterprise, whether it be a soldier operating in harm's way, whether that be a Customs and Border Patrol agent and trying to help keep our borders secure, or a US Coast Guard agent when they're trying to perform a search-and-rescue mission or stop the illegal transportation of narcotics in your country."

Here's how World View's technology works, and what Hartman, who took the helm just a year ago, has done to focus the company into what he hopes will be a fruitful and expanding business - perhaps one that will eventually launch tourists high enough to witness the blackness of space and the curvature of Earth.