The UK’s Advanced Research and Invention Agency (ARIA) is funding 18 projects to build high-altitude drones that carry mobile and internet gear in the stratosphere. The agency has put $94 million into the program, Enduring Atmospheric Platforms, which runs for three and a half years, The Register reports.
The aircraft are high-altitude platform stations, or HAPS, and they fly at roughly 19 km. The plan is for them to take over part of the job of telecom satellites and cover large areas with internet and mobile service. That would avoid putting thousands of spacecraft into orbit.
The stratosphere is already a testbed for this. Sceye’s airship, for one, flew to Japan and back at 20 km, working as a cell tower on SoftBank’s network.
ARIA’s headline target is a platform that carries 300 watts of telecom payload and stays over a chosen area for at least a week without a break. The work is split into three stages. Teams first build the core technologies, then integrate and test complete systems, and finally move to deployment.
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Each team has its own answer to the hard part — staying up for weeks. Startup Menapia is working on Carousel, a fleet of drones flying at up to 19 km that its developers say could cover all of Britain. VFP Aerospace has taken the opposite route and dropped the idea of extreme endurance. Its drones are meant to relieve each other in shifts, so a fresh aircraft slides into position while another returns for charging and maintenance. Each one should cost about $67,000.
Some of the projects are about power rather than airframes. Scalable Laser wants to beam energy up with high-power laser diodes, caught by photovoltaic receivers on board. Space Solar Engineering is looking at radio frequency transmission, including microwaves.
The most unusual pitch comes from the University of Bath. Its researchers hope to stretch flight times by riding atmospheric gravity waves thrown up by weather and terrain. The airframes vary just as widely. Alongside solar-powered planes, ARIA is backing experimental designs whose wings rotate instead of propellers.
The platforms are meant to bring service to parts of the UK and other countries where ground infrastructure is thin or missing entirely.
