In 2018 Google launched Loon, a radical approach to bringing Internet access to rural, remote, and underserved areas using a system of balloons, carried by winds in the stratosphere. The goal was to bring connectivity to everyone on Earth, no matter how remote the location. The technology worked, but the business model didn’t.
Loon was shut down in 2021 but other efforts to tap into the stratosphere’s potential are beginning to take off.
Loon was an iteration of High Altitude Platform Stations (HAPS), fixed wing aircraft, airships and balloons positioned above 20 kilometers altitude, in the stratosphere, for very long-duration flights. Recent advances in solar panel efficiency, battery energy density, lightweight composite materials, autonomous avionics and antennas, coupled with the expansion of frequency bands and new aviation standards, are making HAPS systems more viable, positioning them as an important layer in modern 3D telecommunication infrastructure, together with satellite constellations and terrestrial networks.
Companies such as Airbus/AALTO HAPS, Kraus Hamdani Aerospace, Prismatic, SoftBank/AeroVironment, Stratospheric Platforms, Aerostar, Sceye(see the photo) and Stratosyst, are all working on HAPS. So is the U.S. military.
In addition to tackling the global digital divide and improving coverage for mobile phone users everywhere. HAPS applications include disaster response, defense and earth observation for uses such as wildfire monitoring, atmospheric testing and crop health assessment. (NASA, the U.S. space agency, is using HAPS to detect methane “super emitters,” monitor wildfire activity, storms, earthquakes, and other extreme weather events.) Longer term a constellation of HAPS hubs interconnected with laser links is expected to emerge which could be used to transfer energy from the point of generation to a point of need.
HAPS have been recognized in the Top 10 Emerging Technologies of 2024 report, co-published by the World Economic Forum and the scientific publisher Frontiers, as a transformative innovation poised to significantly influence society and address critical global issues. The Innovator interviewed one of the contributing researchers to the Emerging Technologies report, HAPS technology expert Mohamed-Slim Alouini, Al-Khawarzmi Distinguished Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST) and has conducted its own reporting as part of a collaboration between The Innovator and Frontiers. The series will aim to help executives get an early glimpse of scientific and technological developments and put them into context for business.
THE HAPS ADVANTAGE
HAPS promise to be faster, more cost effective, and more flexible than satellite-based systems.“Satellites cost hundreds of millions of dollars to launch, and you need to cross your fingers that nothing is going to happen,” says Hamed Khalkhali, President of Swift Engineering, which has developed a HAPS Unmanned Aerial System. The issue is not only that satellites somethings blow up during launch. but the slightest vibration can make a payload unusable and once it is in the sky there is no easy way to tweak something or add something to the system, he says. Swift Engineering’s $2 million aircraft can broadcast 24/7 from a specific location. It can stay up for weeks or months, until it needs to be maintained or upgraded, land on a regular runway, and then be recommissioned.
HAPS advantages don’t stop there. “We chose the form factor of HAPS as it allows us to stay over an area of operation for extended periods of time while lifting and powering far more payload than any other platform,” says a spokeswoman for Sceye, a U.S. company that builds high-performance HAPS for stratospheric infrastructure “ Our HAPS are able to station seek above 60k feet using solar power during the day and battery power at night.”
Another plus is that platform stations are potentially more sustainable than satellite mega constellations because, like Sceye’s, they can be powered by clean energy sources such as solar and green hydrogen
HAPS companies are currently making money by servicing government agencies and the defense sector. For example. Swift Engineering’s HAPS aircraft’s payloads include cameras to help the U.S. Forest Service with early detection of fires and the mapping of shorelines to track dehydration due to global warming and the broadcasting of top secret communications for the U.S. military.
Sceye has a Cooperative Research and Development Agreement with the United States Geological Survey and a Space Act Agreement with NASA to enhance climate and environmental imaging, monitoring, and data collection from the stratosphere. It is also collaborating with the Environmental Protection Agency) and the New Mexico Environmental Department on a five-year program to detect methane emissions across the state. “Our technology can detect emissions with a granularity of less than one meter per pixel, allowing us to pinpoint the source of emissions and quantify the emission rate in real time,” says the spokeswoman.
Such services are poised to compete with those provided by commercial earth observation companies like Planet Labs, which has launched 450 satellites and provides services to both government and corporate clients.
CELL TOWERS IN THE SKY
HAPS will also compete with satellite companies providing communication services. For years, satellite communication has remained standalone technology, independent of mobile networking. Now with the next generation of satellites – built from 5G architecture – they are starting to integrate with networks to manage connectivity to cars, vessels, airplanes and other IoT devices in remote and rural areas.
For example. Starlink, a satellite constellation using a low Earth orbit to deliver broadband Internet capable of supporting streaming, online gaming, video calls via satellite dish, has partnered with T-Mobile to launch a direct to mobile phone service this July.
Meanwhile, Vodafone and AST SpaceMobile plan to create a jointly owned European satellite company to provide direct-to-device services to mobile operators. The new venture will build and run a terrestrial backhaul network to connect mobile network operators to the low Earth orbit (LEO) satellite network. The joint venture will seek to provide 100% geographic coverage in every part of Europe to give consumers and businesses access to secure space-based cellular broadband connectivity via their mobile operator. Vodafone said it aims to introduce commercial space-based mobile broadband connectivity across Europe during 2025 and 2026.
Silicon Valley giants Apple and Amazon are also getting into the game. Apple, last year invested more than $1 billion in the satellite-operator Globalstar, which supports the technology giant’s in-house satellite connection feature on iPhones. Apple’s service allows users to send text messages, call emergency assistance, and seek roadside help in areas where cellphone service isn’t available. Now Apple is helping to fund Globalstar’s development of a new global satellite fleet to expand space-based iPhone service. Amazon, for its part, has launched Project Kuiper, an initiative to increase global broadband access through a constellation of more than 3,000 satellites in low Earth orbit.
Because they are closer to earth, in comparison to satellite-based direct-to-device communications, HAPS-based solutions provide faster connection speeds with lower latency, an industrial strength 4G/5G user experience; better indoor penetration/connectivity and higher network capacity, according to the HAPS Alliance, an industry group that includes academics and companies active in the field. This will enable real-time communications speedy enough to communicate with standard smartphones, high-resolution capabilities for imaging tasks and greater sensitivity for sensing applications, says KAUST’s Alouini. HAPS transmit data via free-space optics, or light beams, and large-scale antenna array systems, which can send large amounts of data quickly.
That’s key says Ken Riordan, the former head of product management at Loon and the current president of the HAPS Alliance. Riordan, who is also currently a principal architect at Nokia Federal Solutions, a business unit that sells tech to the US federal government, says HAPS will be able to offer better data services than direct to handset satellite services. “You are not going to be streaming YouTube videos to your phone via satellite in my lifetime, but you will be able to do that from the stratosphere,” he says.
A WIRELESS ENERGY WEB
Longer term – in 2035 or later- HAPS technology could be used to form an energy web, transferring power from one location to another, says KAUST’s Alouini.
The U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) is already working on achieving this via a program called Persistent Optical Wireless Energy Relay (POWER). POWER seeks to demonstrate optical power-beaming relays not only as a resilient alternative for energy transport, but also to enable HAPS aircraft to provide on-demand power to places where it would prove difficult, expensive, or dangerous to reach with grid infrastructure or fuel or battery shipments.
To create this wireless energy web, POWER seeks to design and demonstrate effective airborne optical energy relays. Optical technologies are expected to create an airborne relay capable of redirection, wavefront correction, and energy harvesting of optical beams. These relays are a critical component necessary to allow ground-sourced lasers to be coupled with high-altitude, efficient long-range transmission. The goal is to use three airborne relay nodes hosted on aircraft to transmit energy from a ground source laser to 60,000 feet in altitude, and back down to a ground receiver located over a hundred miles away.
“Energy underpins every activity we do, including defense,” Paul Jaffe, an electronics engineer who leads DARPA’s POWER initiative said in an interview with IEEE Spectrum, a publication of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers . A wireless energy web “could simplify logistics and fuel supply in an extremely flexible and efficient manner that’s quickly reconfigurable,” Jaffe said.
DARPA is testing conceptual designs for aerial platforms that can siphon a fraction of the beamed energy to power themselves. This strategy could lead to smaller, less-expensive future aircraft, since it could dramatically reduce the space they would need for their engines and fuel. Such aircraft could also harvest energy from the beamed power instead of requiring trips for refueling or recharging, which could result in essentially unlimited range and endurance.“This would demonstrate that we will have a means to deliver energy over very long distances to places that would otherwise be difficult to deliver it to,” Jaffe told IEEE Spectrum.
BARRIERS TO SCALING
Delivering communications remains the holy grail for the HAPS sector, says Riordan. Google proved it could be done with the Loon project. “But we are not where we need to be in order to deploy at scale,” he says. “At this point it’s not a telecom problem, it is an aerospace problem,” he says.
One of the sticking points is that long endurance aircraft in the stratosphere are not going to have a human being in the cockpit. “This does not align with fundamental aviation rules that revolve around controllers in a tower. It doesn’t work when there is no pilot up there. There are lots of aviation regulatory challenges,” says Riordan.
And before HAPS can provide Internet connectivity to everyone on Earth the right economic model must be found.
For these reasons 2025 will not be the year that commercial telecommunication services are launched on HAPS, says Riordan.
“We are not far away,” he says. “Today there is technical feasibility; there isn’t economic viability, but it is coming,” says Riordan. “The early adopters of this will not be ranchers in Kenya, they will be people with greater economic means.” That said, there is a good chance that Google’s idea of economically bringing broadband connectivity to the more than two billion people who are still without it could eventually fly, he says.
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