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 spac