PARIS — France’s military is expanding into what it calls “very high altitude,” or near-space, with a test on Monday shooting down target balloons at an altitude of more than 20 kilometers, and this week detailing the strategy for what the country sees as an increasingly contested area.

France is upgrading radars to detect objects between 20 and 100 kilometers altitude and adapting fighter jets and air defenses to intercept high-flying targets, Philippe Koffi, in charge of strategy for air, land and naval combat systems at the Directorate General for Armament, said in a press briefing here on Thursday. Next steps will include lasers, space planes and stratospheric drones.

Near-space will become increasingly militarized, similar to what happened in low Earth orbit and on the sea floor, Armed Forces Minister Sebastien Lecornu said at the Paris Air Show on June 17, where he outlined France’s very-high altitude strategy.

The minister and other officials discussing the plans all referenced the 2023 incident of a Chinese high-altitude balloon overflying the United States, before being shot down.

“As technology develops, we will collectively be flying higher and faster, and therefore investing in this altitude range between 20 and 100 kilometers, for both civilian and military purposes,” said Brig. Gen. Alexis Rougier, in charge of very high altitude within the French Air and Space Force, at the briefing on Thursday.

Near-space is a legal gray area, according to Rougier. While the Chicago Convention defines a country’s airspace as sovereign, and the Outer Space Treaty states outer space shall be free for everyone to use, neither defines where airspace ends and outer space begins.

“Beyond the international legal ambiguity on this point, the challenge lies in our capacity to climb so high and so quickly to enforce sovereignty,” Rougier said.

“The goal is to master this segment in the future in all three areas: detecting objects in this segment, which is no easy task; being able to intercept them and neutralize them if they pose a threat; and operating at very high altitudes to take advantage of these benefits,” Rougier said.

In a first step on Monday, a Rafale and a Mirage fired MBDA Mica missiles at two target balloons “well above” 20 kilometers altitude, neutralizing the targets, DGA head Emmanuel Chiva told a parliamentary defense committee on Wednesday. The test entailed optimizing the radar and the guidance on the fighters and the Mica missiles, according to Koffi.

Rougier said he spoke to U.S. F-22 pilots who shared some details on the 2023 balloon shoot-down, which helped to prepare Monday’s test.

France is also in the process of upgrading its Thales GM400 and GM200 radars with optimized filters and artificial intelligence to detect “complex objects” in near-space, according to Koffi. For early warning of ballistic missiles and hypersonic weapons, France is also counting on a long-range UHF alerter from Thales, as well as its Nostradamus over-the-horizon radar.

The DGA is providing new financing for Nostradamus, operated by French aerospace research center Onera since at least the early 2000s. The fixed radar array about 100 kilometers west of Paris uses high-frequency radio waves bouncing off the ionosphere to detect any aircraft, including stealth and hypersonic, at a range of between 700 and 3,000 kilometers.

Over-the-horizon radar was deployed in 1960s by the United States and the Soviet Union to detect ballistic missile launches. With the Cold War over, French researchers in recent years had been using Nostradamus to track meteorites and observe radio emissions from the Sun and Jupiter.

France is also counting on Europe’s future Odin’s Eye satellite constellation for space-based detection, which Koffi said should become available around 2030.

The DGA is evaluating the capability of the next-generation SAMP/T air-defense system to intercept high-flying and fast targets such as balloons and hypersonic missiles, and is investing in the development of a ground-based 50 kilowatt laser demonstrator that by 2030 would be capable of neutralizing optics onboard satellites and balloons.

The third leg in the French very-high altitude strategy is being able to operate there, with ongoing projects including the Stratobus airship being developed by Thales Alenia Space, focused on surveillance and communication.

The BalMan maneuverable balloon developed by Hemeria will be tested by the end of the year, while the Airbus Zephyr high-altitude solar-powered drone will perform a test flight by the end of the summer, according to Koffi.

The French budget allocated to near-space is limited for now, around €10 million euros ($12 million) for the first projects such as Nostradamus and BalMan, according to Koffi. That will increase to several tens of millions when France updates its annual defense budget, particularly to fund the UHF alerter and the Stratobus, he said.

Going forward, big, long-term weapons programs will need to allocate funding to incorporate near-space requirements, Koffi said. That includes SAMP/T NG but also as the Future Combat Air System, according to the DGA engineer, who is also the French head of the team in charge of FCAS program management. “So the very-high altitude won’t be an isolated budget line.”

Lecornu said that France can’t miss the boat on near-space, saying “there is no question of reliving what we went through with drones,” where the country has been playing catch-up.

For its part, “the DGA is obviously committed to seeing this through, with the aim of equipping the armed forces with capabilities to neutralize threats and operate in this new domain, control of which is now more than ever a matter of national sovereignty,” Chiva told lawmakers in his hearing on Wednesday.

France also signed an agreement with Dassault Aviation on June 20 to provide financing to develop a reusable space-plane demonstrator called Vortex, for Véhicule Orbital Réutilisable de Transport et d’Exploration. The DGA will provide €30 million of financing on a total budget of €70 million for the demonstrator, which Koffi said is expected to fly late 2027 or early 2028.

The armaments office together with the French space center CNES will work on identifying possible missions for Vortex, according to Koffi. In addition to bringing cargo into space, that could include actions from orbit exploiting the aircraft’s high maneuverability during re-entry, which could be “reconnaissance missions or even strike missions,” he said.

The goal of the demonstrator will be a suborbital flight at Mach 12 by 2027 to test hypersonic guidance, thermal protection and terminal maneuverability, Chiva told lawmakers.

“We want to be able to launch satellites reactively, for example, or carry out operations in orbit,” Chiva said. “A space plane is absolutely necessary.”