Amazing stuff!
"... The trans-Pacific flight that took place over a month between August and September 2026 was the most notable milestone yet for Sceye, a US aerospace company based near Albuquerque, New Mexico. Sceye has developed an uncrewed platform filled with helium for buoyancy and equipped with an electric-powered propeller for active propulsion, allowing it to resist most strong winds and keep hovering over the same location for long periods. The platform also uses top-mounted solar panels and onboard batteries to stay powered for stratospheric operations around the clock. ...
The lighter-than-air platform has also benefited from advances in material sciences that “were either not discovered or not understood back in the late 1990s,” ... the example of the discovery of graphene in 2004, which “greatly helped us optimize strength relative to weight on our hull, the energy density of our batteries, and performance relative to the area and weight of our solar panels.”
The design could eventually scale up to a high altitude platform system (HAPS) capable of lifting payloads as heavy as 551 pounds (250 kilograms). That would be between 25 and 50 times more payload capacity than competing stratospheric platforms like high-flying drones ..."
Sceye’s Stratospheric Platform Re-enters United States After Record-Breaking Roundtrip Stratospheric Flight Between U.S. and Japan (original company news release) "The journey, which lasted 30 days and traversed nearly 30,000 km, included operating for a week in the stratosphere over Japan. While over Japan, Sceye and its partner SoftBank Corp. successfully verified Direct-to-Device connectivity to unmodified devices, HAPS-based communications with drones, and edge computing from the stratosphere."
Sceye's high altitude platform system (HAPS) launches from New Mexico to begin a trans-Pacific flight to Japan on August 9, 2026
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