Sceye’s high-altitude airship completed a more than 24-hr. flight in the stratosphere after launching on Aug. 15.

The New Mexico-based company says the high-altitude platform station’s (HAPS) flight was the first full diurnal flight its airship has made in the stratosphere while staying over a designated area of operation.

“This is a critical milestone toward long-duration flights of months or years by using solar power through daylight hours, and battery capacity enabling overnight flight through solar recharge the next morning,” Sceye said Aug. 19. The demonstration flight also showed the airship was capable of controlled relocation, the company says.

The 270-ft.-long HAPS airship uses a solar panel array on its top to generate electricity during the day and lithium sulfur batteries to store that electricity. The batteries power a tail-mounted, electric-driven propeller.

“This is a significant milestone for the Sceye team, toward opening up vast opportunities in the stratosphere, building an entirely new layer of infrastructure between drones and satellites,” Sceye CEO Mikkel Vestergaard Frandsen says. “The ability to stay in the stratosphere for long durations over an area of operation offers a unique vantage point for detecting climate disasters in real time like wildfires and methane leaks, as well as connectivity to the billions of unconnected which conventional infrastructures cannot serve.”

The airship carried payloads including stereo-optical cameras, intended for creating elevation models to observe disasters such as floods and earthquakes, infrared cameras for helping to predict and detect wildfires, as well as detect methane leaks, and a synthetic aperture radar, Sceye says.

Sceye says it has completed 20 test flights thus far with its airship, with two additional test flights planned for 2024.