Skypipe: Ground-Based Stratospheric Delivery
Developing a general-purpose platform for continuous ground-to-stratosphere delivery, with applications spanning climate contingency, atmospheric catastrophe response, and atmospheric monitoring.
Every proposed stratospheric intervention, whether reflecting sunlight to counteract warming or promoting sedimentation of volcanic aerosol after an eruption, faces the same engineering barrier: how to move large quantities of material from the ground to 20 km altitude, continuously, reliably, and at manageable cost.
Prior concepts using tethered balloons and buoyancy-driven chimneys have encountered binding physical constraints. Aircraft-based approaches borrow maturity from aviation but face steep costs at scale. CCI's stratospheric delivery program addresses this shared barrier directly.
Skypipe proposes a third mechanism for supporting a conduit to the stratosphere: wall shear from fast-moving gas inside fabric tubes. Rather than suspending a pipe from a balloon above or relying on buoyancy within, the friction of high-velocity air against the tube wall generates a distributed upward force that exceeds the tube's weight. The tube is held up by its own flow.
The result is a ground-based installation, a cluster of fabric tubes enclosed in a streamlined fairing, with compressors at the base and a payload release system at the top. It requires no balloon, no tether, and no fleet of aircraft. The engineering challenge is application-agnostic: the same platform that delivers reflective aerosol for climate contingency can deliver material to promote clearing of volcanic emissions or support continuous stratospheric monitoring.
Skypipe's architecture, a fixed ground-based installation with a known location, auditable throughput, and observable output, was chosen in part because it is inherently governable. A fixed installation can be inspected, permitted, regulated, monitored, and shut down by the host state.
CCI has been analyzing the technical feasibility of the Skypipe concept since January 2024. Our physics-based analysis indicates the concept warrants serious technical evaluation. Formal results, including limitations and unresolved questions, will be published in forthcoming technical papers.
- Physics-based feasibility evaluation of the Skypipe delivery platform
- Application analysis across climate contingency, volcanic response, and monitoring
- Technical barrier identification and characterization
- Risk and uncertainty quantification
- Monitoring, verification, and governance framework development
The Stratospheric Delivery program has passed its Preliminary Feasibility Review. CCI is now seeking expanded scientific and engineering capacity to advance to the next research phase.
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