Sceye is a material science company and developer of high-altitude platform stations (HAPS), helium-lifted, solar-powered aircraft that operate in the stratosphere. Sceye is a Swiss-based company with operations at the Roswell Air Center.

 

In September Sceye asked the City of Artesia for a letter of support addressed to the New Mexico Connect Council for Sceye’s application for $10 million in ARPA grant funding for its upcoming test flight. Artesia Mayor Jon Henry reported on this request at the September 13 City Council meeting. Henry spoke with Ross Horner at PVT, City staff, Artesia school officials and others and found no resistance to the request. “It’s an interesting company,” said Henry. “One possible application of the technology is providing internet service to school buses.” 

 

According to Anastasia Grinberg, Senior Manager of Strategy and Business Development, Sceye has already conducted a number of successful test flights in the stratosphere, including a June 2022 test flight that flew at 64,600 feet, over 12 miles high. “The ultimate goal is to maintain flight for months at a time,” she said.“Sceye has a partnership with the EPA to monitor air quality in the Permian basin in the near future.” 

 

Sceye’s HAPS design looks much like a blimp and can lift a variety of payload for connectivity, earth observation, and research, including a large bank of batteries, cameras, sensors, hyper-spectral imaging, radar and more. Sceye is solar powered during the day and battery powered at night.

 

Sceye connects directly to mobile devices and observes the Earth in real-time at resolutions that have never been possible before. HAPS creates the possibility of serving remote and rural areas, as well as regions where terrain has made cell towers, satellites, and fiber-optic cables difficult to install.

 

According to the website Sceye was founded in 2014 and has developed a new generation of stratospheric platforms to provide universal connectivity, improve climate change monitoring, natural resource stewardship, forest fires monitoring as well as detection and monitoring of natural disasters.