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> there are significant high voltage insulation challenges at higher altitudes

What are these challenges? How does having a near vacuum cause trouble with ~1kV potentials?

The phenomenon is due to Paschen's law (there is a good wikipedia article on it). The breakdown potential of a gas is minimized at some pressure, and in the case of air, that pressure is < 1 atm, and corresponds to a specific altitude.

I can't go into much detail, but we are working on addressing this in a couple different ways in our insulation system design.

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