Sceye ST1 is a stratospheric airship that carries what the company calls a “cell tower in the sky.” It has just completed a record-setting round trip between New Mexico and Japan. Sceye confirmed the milestone in a press release after the vehicle re-entered U.S. airspace.
A 30-day loop across two continents
The airship launched on August 9, 2026. Thirteen days later it reached Japan. Then it turned around and flew back. On September 4 it re-entered the continental United States. The next day it settled into airspace near Sceye’s headquarters in Moriarty, New Mexico.
In total, ST1 covered nearly 30,000 kilometers (about 18,600 miles). Along the way it operated inside Japanese-managed airspace for more than seven days. It also held position off Japan’s coast with a station-seeking radius as low as five kilometers. Throughout the flight it stayed between 16.5 and 17 kilometers above the ground.
A cell tower that flies
Notably, the payload is what makes the flight newsworthy. ST1 carries SceyeCELL, a first-of-its-kind airborne base station. The company describes it as a “cell tower in the sky.”
Working with SoftBank Corp., the team verified direct-to-device connectivity to unmodified phones through SoftBank’s own core network. Specifically, it demonstrated text, voice, internet access and video streaming. In addition, it handled drone communications and emergency alert messaging for large-scale disasters.
Onboard, it ran its own server. That edge-computing setup returned an average round-trip processing time of 68 milliseconds. As a result, Sceye says, latency drops by more than 40 percent versus internet-based cloud servers.
“The stratosphere is what will enable the always-on future – including the promised land of 6G,” said Mikkel Vestergaard Frandsen, Sceye’s founder and CEO.
Why it matters for connectivity costs
Sceye positions the platform as a middle layer between ground networks and orbit. It operates like a geostationary satellite but sits 1,800 times closer to Earth. In fact, the company says one HAPS at full scale could cover roughly the area of 500 terrestrial towers.
If those claims hold up in service, stratospheric broadband becomes an alternative to satellite constellations and new tower builds. That is the same crowded space where Europe’s IRIS2 program is pushing its Starlink rival toward deployment. It also follows a wave of LEO internet efforts such as Amazon’s Leo fleet crossing 394 satellites.
However, this remains a demonstration, not a service. ST1 is the first flight of Sceye’s Service Test Program and its first trip to Asia. Ultimately, independent verification of coverage, reliability and pricing still lies ahead.
