Aerospace startup Sceye has partnered with NASA and the US Geological Survey to deploy climate management tools to monitor fires and storms at the edge of space, the company and government agencies exclusively told Reuters on Tuesday.

Sceye’s solar-powered High Altitude Platform System (HAPS) looks like a ship, which can carry a wide array of sensors for Earth observation and disaster response.

This comes as part of a research and development cooperation agreement between the three entities signed in 2021, with no money exchanged.

As part of the agreement, NASA, USGS and Sceye will explore the detection capabilities and test the robustness of the stratospheric hyperspectral imaging system.

HAPS, which can hover at altitudes exceeding 60,000 feet, promises to be a cheaper and more efficient alternative to satellites and observation equipment that run on small aircraft.

Orbiting satellites with similar capabilities require expensive rockets – which are in short supply – and are not designed to return from space, while small aircraft have operational time limitations.

Instead, Sceye’s platform can take off from a launch site at the desired altitude in about half an hour.

“We are about 10 times cheaper than the alternative because the alternative is to use Cessna flights that take off and land and have a human pilot,” Mikkel Frandsen told Reuters in an interview, adding that a HAPS system costs less than 10 million dollars. to build

The company, founded by Frandsen in 2014, announced a late-stage fundraising in September that valued the startup at $525 million pre-money and gave the company enough liquidity to launch commercial operations next year.

Sceye’s platform offers an advantage over alternatives because it can carry multiple types of payloads, which would increase a satellite’s weight and, by extension, its launch costs by millions of dollars.

“(HAPS is) unique in that they have this ability to lift what we call multi-mission payloads, meaning lots of different sensors into the stratosphere,” Jonathan Stock, director of the USGS’s National Innovation Center, told Reuters .

Stock said Sceye’s platform can continuously collect highly detailed critical data about environmental events such as wildfires, storms and earthquakes, which can make forecasts more accurate and reliable, while being “an order of magnitude size cheaper”.