Sceye, a U.S. aerospace company based in New Mexico, has completed a stratospheric test mission in which one of its high-altitude airship platforms flew nearly 30,000 kilometers from New Mexico to Japan and back while delivering mobile broadband service to ordinary smartphones, the company said.
The mission, called Service Test 1 (ST1), began on August 9, 2026. Thirteen days later, the platform reached Japan, where it carried out a series of tests with the Japanese telecommunications operator SoftBank. On September 4, the High Altitude Platform Station, or HAPS, returned to U.S. airspace, and by the next day it had arrived near Sceye's headquarters in New Mexico, where it underwent final checks before a planned landing.
Testing a stratospheric cell tower
The central goal of the mission was to test SceyeCELL, a fully functional mobile base station carried aboard the airship. Flying roughly 20 kilometers above the ground, the platform delivered broadband connectivity through SoftBank's network directly to standard, unmodified smartphones. Sceye said that in the future, a single platform of this kind could cover an area that currently requires around 500 ground-based cell towers.
During the flight, engineers also tested emergency calling, a mass public alert system and communication links with drones. Sceye said it views such platforms as a potential component of a future three-dimensional telecommunications network that would combine ground infrastructure, stratospheric platforms and satellites.
A data center in the stratosphere
The mission also tested an airborne data center. The HAPS platform carried a server and elements of a mobile network core, allowing some data to be processed directly in the stratosphere rather than being sent to remote cloud data centers.
Average latency under this setup was 68 milliseconds. According to Sceye and SoftBank, moving computing power onto the platform itself cut response times by more than 40% compared with traditional cloud-based processing. The companies described it as the first successful experiment in which a mobile network core and a web server operated entirely on board a stratospheric platform.
A middle layer between towers and satellites
Sceye positions HAPS as an intermediate layer between ground cell towers and satellite constellations. Because it operates in the stratosphere, the platform sits much closer to Earth than satellites do, which the company says allows it to combine lower latency with far wider coverage than a conventional ground-based base station.
