Stratospheric airship flew from US to Japan to test sky cell tower concept
摘要
美国航空航天公司Sceye研发的无人氦气飞艇于2026年8月至9月完成为期一个月的跨太平洋往返飞行，从新墨西哥州飞抵日本后返回。该飞艇配备电力螺旋桨、顶部太阳能板和机载电池，可在约6万英尺的平流层长时间悬停于同一区域，高度为航空交通的两倍、低于喷气急流，且比低轨卫星近30倍。此次飞行旨在验证轻于空气的平台作为“空中手机基站”的可行性。
Nearly 100 years after the dirigible Graf Zeppelin made the first nonstop airship journey across the Pacific Ocean, another airship has successfully completed a round-trip flight from New Mexico to Japan and back. But the significance of this modern feat was less about the journey's length and more about its purpose: demonstrating how a lighter-than-air platform can act as a cell phone tower in the sky.
The trans-Pacific flight that took place over a month between August and September 2026 was the most notable milestone yet for Sceye, a US aerospace company based near Albuquerque, New Mexico. Sceye has developed an uncrewed platform filled with helium for buoyancy and equipped with an electric-powered propeller for active propulsion, allowing it to resist most strong winds and keep hovering over the same location for long periods. The platform also uses top-mounted solar panels and onboard batteries to stay powered for stratospheric operations around the clock.
“We can stay over an area of operation, and we do that in the stratosphere right around 60,000 feet, so we're twice as high as air traffic and we're above the jet stream, and yet 30 times closer than low-Earth orbit satellites,” Mikkel Frandsen, founder and CEO of Sceye, told Ars. “We can fly through day and night until the sun comes up the next morning and recharges the batteries, at which point we're still at the same altitude and still over the same area of operation.”
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