Sceye HAPS has completed its first flight to Asia, with the U.S. aerospace and material science company confirming that its Service Test 1 platform travelled from New Mexico to Japan through the stratosphere. The trip covered more than 15,000 km in 13 days, and once the vehicle arrived over Japan it delivered mobile broadband to unmodified devices through SoftBank Corp.’s core network. The mission also tested edge computing at altitude and communications with drones, two capabilities tied to plans for a three-dimensional network.
Sceye specializes in High-Altitude Platform Systems used for telecommunications and real-time environmental monitoring, and the Japan flight was carried out with SoftBank, a leading telecommunications and IT operator in Japan and globally. The company calls the mission its first flight to Asia and a milestone toward commercial deployment of HAPS as stratospheric infrastructure. Sceye platforms hold altitude and their area of operation through consecutive day and night cycles, working much like geostationary satellites while sitting about 1,800 times closer to Earth at a fraction of the cost.
Sceye HAPS Flies From New Mexico Into Japanese Airspace
The ST1 mission lifted off at 7:00 AM MDT on August 9, 2026 from New Mexico. Sceye HAPS then crossed the Pacific and operated inside airspace managed by Japan for more than seven days, staying within its area of operation for an extended stretch and holding a station-seeking radius as small as 5 km. The platform worked at roughly 16.5 km in altitude while running telecommunications, drone, and emergency communications tests. At the time of the announcement, ST1 was still in flight and heading back toward the United States.
“This flight marks a defining moment for Sceye and for the commercial potential of HAPS. Flying from the US to Japan demonstrates the performance required to make the stratosphere a viable layer of infrastructure and realize the future of AI, edge computing, and 6G. Together with SoftBank, we are moving beyond proving the technology to demonstrating how Sceye can complement and extend existing networks and deliver persistent connectivity at scale.” Mikkel Vestergaard Frandsen, Founder and CEO of Sceye
The stratosphere sits close enough to Earth for high-capacity connectivity and observation while offering wide-area reach, and it provides space-like conditions without the cost of orbit. ST1 carried SceyeCELL, a first-of-its-kind cell tower in the sky built to send wide-area mobile broadband straight to standard devices. At full scale, a single Sceye HAPS is designed to cover the equivalent area of roughly 500 terrestrial towers.
Drone Communications and Edge Computing From the Stratosphere
During the mission the two companies demonstrated mobile broadband from the stratosphere, including text messaging, voice calls, internet access, and video streaming. Testing also covered emergency calls placed through an alert system designed for large-scale disasters, plus communications with drones. Sceye reported that performance matched terrestrial networks while reducing radio interference with ground-based base stations.
A server installed on the platform allowed data processing to happen onboard rather than in a distant data center. Average round-trip processing response time came in at 68 milliseconds, cutting communications latency by more than 40 percent compared with internet-based cloud processing. Sceye describes the result as the world’s first successful test in which a mobile core network and a web server were installed on a HAPS, with responses handled onboard before results were relayed back to smartphones.
SoftBank Partnership Points Toward HAPS Commercialization
SoftBank invested in Sceye’s HAPS-based stratospheric infrastructure in 2025, treating it as a scalable option that can complement terrestrial towers and satellite constellations. The partnership is built around HAPS and Non-Terrestrial Networks as infrastructure that can expand connectivity, keep communications running during disasters, and support future applications across AI, IoT, aerial communications, edge computing, and 6G.
“SoftBank aims to build next-generation communications infrastructure that seamlessly connects the ground, the sky, and space. The fact that Sceye’s HAPS reached Japan from the United States and successfully provided Japan’s first trial services from the stratosphere in Japan’s airspace marks an important step toward the commercialization of HAPS, which is at the core of this vision. By combining the HAPS flight and operational technologies that Sceye has developed with SoftBank’s communications technologies, we have gained confidence to realize a three-dimensional communications network utilizing HAPS. Going forward, in collaboration with Sceye, we will continue to integrate a wide range of technologies, including communications and AI, to develop HAPS into a new form of social infrastructure.” Junichi Miyakawa, President & CEO of SoftBank Corp.
ST1 is the first mission in Sceye’s Service Test Program, which follows the Endurance Program completed earlier this year. During that program, its SE2 platform flew more than 10,000 km through the stratosphere from New Mexico to the coast of Brazil and stayed over its area of operation for several days to test long-duration performance. Sceye was founded in 2014 and works on connectivity, climate monitoring, natural resource management, and disaster prevention.
