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TAMPA, Fla. — Stratospheric pseudo-satellites are shedding their reputation as fringe experiments as governments and industry step up demand, according to executives closing in on commercial services for their high-altitude platform stations (HAPS).
Aalto of the U.K. and U.S.-based Sceye and Aerostar are now regularly flying HAPS test missions in the stratosphere following years of technology advances in energy storage, lightweight materials and station-keeping systems.
“It means that we’re not village idiots anymore,” Sceye CEO Mikkel Frandsen said Sept. 16 during a discussion on HAPS at World Space Business Week in Paris.
“We’re an actual industry — and more importantly, the last few years have shown that station keeping in the stratosphere is far more scalable than being in orbit, and that is driving a lot of value, because at the end of the day, what investors want to see are systems and scale.”
Following an investment from Japanese internet giant Softbank, Sceye is planning a commercial pilot next year that would see its stratospheric vehicle take off from New Mexico to provide mobile broadband over Japan, before returning to the United States. Sceye, which uses solar-powered, helium-filled airships designed for heavy payload capacity, is also preparing a similar mission to Mexico.
Meanwhile, Aalto is gearing up for a commercial demonstration of its Airbus-backed solar-powered, fixed-wing Zephyr platform over Japan in 2026, with partners including SoftBank rival NTT Docomo.
“The technology part has been mastered,” Aalto CEO Hughes Boulnois told the conference. “We’ve been investing in this technology now for more than a decade, and now we are starting the commercialization.”
Frandsen said Sceye and Aalto are currently the only companies that have flown HAPS through both day and night, marking a key milestone because batteries must sustain operations when solar power is unavailable.
Boulnois claimed Aalto also set a record earlier this year with a 67-day Zephyr flight from its dedicated launch and landing site in Kenya, where it also recently opened a call for external partners to develop new payloads for the “stratospace” market.
“It’s a new domain of aerospace where we will be bringing new technologies, new services to our customers,” he said.
“And therefore we need specific new payloads in the domain of connectivity, in the domain of Earth observation, but also in the domain of governmental, military applications.”
Europe’s Thales Alenia Space is also positioning for this emerging market with Stratobus, a semi-rigid stratospheric airship concept, amid growing interest in the potential for HAPS to deliver persistent surveillance, disaster monitoring and sovereign communications.
Delphine Knab, the company’s senior vice president of strategy, innovation, M&A and new business initiatives, highlighted growing demand for military and civil applications in particular, amid a broader shift toward hybrid architectures combining terrestrial, space and HAPS networks.
Aalto and Sceye’s commercial pilots tie closely to national priorities for disaster resilience and emergency communications, where the Japanese government has been actively promoting HAPS as part of its non-terrestrial networks strategy.
And Knab highlighted efforts in France to integrate stratospheric systems into its official defense strategy.
But Boulnois said commercial use cases, particularly direct-to-device connectivity, are catching up.
Still, ramping up production and navigating regulatory frameworks remain sizable hurdles left to clear.
“The technology works,” Boulnois said, “it’s now, how do we scale up and deliver to the customer?”
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