This high-tech airship from the LifeStraw inventor could be the future of wildfire detection

A fleet of 280-foot-long helium-filled airships known as High Altitude Platform Systems (HAPS) may soon hit the skies to help tackle today’s most pressing issues, including wildfire prevention. They are, essentially, enormous, shiny blimps, a modern-day alternative for stationed monitoring. Mikkel Vestergaard Frandsen—founder and CEO of Sceye, the company launching them—prefers the term “stratospheric infrastructure.”

Currently, wildfire monitoring is the charge of low-earth-orbit satellites (LEOs), which operate at least 250 miles up in space and are not stationed over an area, rather passing by infrequently. Other tools, like drones, are limited by battery, and aircraft are restricted by smoke, daylight, and crew personnel requirements.

But these tools alone may not be robust enough to deal with the increasing severity of the fires. Wildfires have doubled in frequency in the last 20 years, recently devastating communities from Greece to Hawaii. They’ve caused loss of life and property destruction as well as a 60% increase of carbon dioxide emissions in those two decades. In just the first five months of this year alone, more than 30,000 fires have burned 2.4 million acres of U.S. land.

HAPS sit at the stratosphere level, 12 miles above Earth—at least 20 times closer than LEOs. They can continuously track and image wildfires across tens of thousands of square feet then communicate alerts to ground services without losing connectivity as satellites often do. Because they can remain static for months on end and run on solar energy stored by night in large-capacity lithium-sulfur batteries, they can monitor constantly without interruption.

Their proximity means HAPS can see more granular detail, including small ignitions and signs of impending fires before they even start. “We can see what nobody else can see and connect with speeds and capacities that nobody else can,” Frandsen says. “The advantages of offering space-like conditions, without the cost of going to space, is just enormous.”

Expanding a legacy

Frandsen’s past inventions have focused on widespread public health problems in the Global South. With PermaNet, he has distributed more than 3 billion malaria nets containing insecticide. With LifeStraw’s water filters, in tandem with the Carter Center, he has helped reduce cases of Guinea worm disease from 3.5 million to just 10.

Giant blimps may seem a far cry from those solutions, but Frandsen says Sceye’s work has the same material science basis. “This does not feel like a stretch for me,” he says. And while the earlier innovations felt “siloed,” Sceye has many different applications.

It’s no wonder the blimps are so big. Onboard the airships are numerous sensor apparatuses, known as payloads, including a wide optical imager precise enough to detect individual people across hundreds of square miles and a 30x zoom camera that can capture those same distances in 4K definition. They’re suited to wildfire detection because they have a radar that has 24/7 3D awareness and the ability to see through smoke, as well as high-resolution cameras that can locate an individual tree burning or a specific team of firefighters.

Growing HAPS’ scope

Beyond wildfire detection, Frandsen sees HAPS playing a role in monitoring human trafficking, helping search and rescue, and spotting methane leaks, because of payload features like a high-precision infrared sensor that can accurately measure methane flow from identified sources. “You’re going to have one HAPS [with] all those services on it,” Frandsen says, comparing it to an iPhone with an endless number of apps.

The past year has been pivotal, with a focus on flight tests to prove the airships’ endurance. In early 2026, over 12 days, one HAPS took off from New Mexico then flew over part of the Atlantic to Brazil and parked there for a week. This summer one will embark on another flight to Japan—a demo for investor SoftBank.

Besides SoftBank, two other telecommunications partners are UAE-based Mawarid and Mexico-based América Móvil. “It’s not a coincidence that our three largest investors are multinational telecom corporations,” Frandsen says, as the HAPS function as cell towers, with antennas transmitting at 5G frequencies. He adds that the companies see the stratosphere as “a promised land for 6G from where all the real-time services can take place.”

To start with, though, the focus is on wildfires, a grave danger of our time. He says it would cost a local or state agency about $10 million per year to partner with HAPS. But Frandsen says it’s worth the cost given the economic toll—the U.S. lost $19 billion due to wildfires in 2024 alone. For a state like California, with the world’s fourth-largest economy, “it’s not a sustainable business model to burn the entire state to the ground once a year.”

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