Moriarty, New Mexico – September 13, 2026 -- Sceye's ST1 high-altitude platform completed a nearly 30,000 km round-trip flight from New Mexico to Japan and back, re-entering continental U.S. airspace on September 4, 2026 and reaching Moriarty, New Mexico on September 5, 2026, where the company conducted final vehicle testing and a planned descent.
ST1 marks Sceye's first flight to Asia in partnership with SoftBank
The month-long mission was conducted with SoftBank Corp. (TOKYO: 9434) and represents Sceye's first flight into Asian airspace. ST1 carried SceyeCELL, described as a first-of-its-kind stratospheric "cell tower in the sky" built to deliver wide-area mobile broadband directly to standard devices. At full scale, one Sceye HAPS is designed to cover an area equivalent to roughly 500 terrestrial towers.
The platform operated inside Japanese-managed airspace for over seven days
ST1 maintained station at 16.5 to 17 km altitude off the Japanese coast, achieving a station-seeking radius as low as 5 km. During this window, Sceye and SoftBank tested telecommunications, drone communications, and emergency messaging systems designed for large-scale disaster response, alongside text messaging, voice calls, internet access, and video streaming from the stratosphere.
Onboard data processing cut communications latency by more than 40%
Through a server installed directly on the HAPS, the two companies recorded an average round-trip processing response time of 68 milliseconds, reducing latency by over 40% compared with internet-based cloud processing. Sceye said this marked the world's first successful test in which a mobile core network and a web server were installed on a HAPS, allowing response processing to occur entirely onboard before relaying results to smartphones. The companies also confirmed communications performance equivalent to terrestrial networks while reducing radio interference with ground-based base stations.
Sceye frames the stratosphere as infrastructure operating like geostationary satellites at a fraction of the cost
Mikkel Vestergaard Frandsen, Founder and CEO of Sceye, said the mission proved the company's technology, vehicle systems, payload, and operational infrastructure are ready for connectivity services. He said Sceye's HAPS hold altitude and position through consecutive day-night cycles similarly to geostationary satellites, but roughly 1,800 times closer to Earth. ST1 is the first flight of Sceye's Service Test Program.