So this would be a balloon that's divided by a bladder to allow segregated mixtures of helium and Martian air to vary the altitude as necessary. I noticed in the website's slides they mention, post deployment from Red Dragon, that it could cost something like $320 million, which puts its within the range of a Discovery mission. A main limitation they note is that accommodating the bandwidth of the amount of images they would wish to collect is barely feasible with current Mars communication.Interesting in that all this is derived from a Google effort to increase internet availability on Earth.
In the longer term future, this would be a tiny piece of an ITS. If it has value, you could probably throw a couple on an ITS and barely dent the cargo capacity. But that is too far out to speculate.
I noticed in the website's slides they mention, post deployment from Red Dragon, that it could cost something like $320 million, which puts its within the range of a Discovery mission.
I'd love to read the whole presentation, but not from a site that demands Linkedin membership(which I absolutely refuse to have any dealings with). Sorry, about that.