HAPS, The Real Deal Pages

HIGH ALTITUDE PLATFORMS (HAPS) ARE THE REAL DEAL

There is always a core of innovative individuals working against the mainstream in every major organization. Imagine yourself in the year 2016, arguing in favor of a lighter-than-air project before experts in space travel who were more interested in deep space exploration and a NASA back-to-the-moon mission. You can imagine the mocking looks! How did that core of innovative individuals dare to reinvent a 236-years old story? Seriously! Well, they swallowed their pride for six years even though they were aware that the French Army was a powerful ally in support of this program. And deftly they reached a formal agreement for the signing of a European-wide initiative funded by the EU in June 2022. In a classic odd turn of events, every critic’s voice turned positive. High altitude platforms (HAPS), or pseudo-satellites, are unmanned craft with adequate endurance to perform long-term services but avoid interfering with the height of present commercial aircraft at an altitude of 10 km. HAPS, like their LTS cousins, are lifted with helium and powered by solar energy at their 20 km high station-keeping position. An example in the lower stratosphere, where winds are moderate and air density is still enough to support buoyancy, is Stratobus by Thales, 1 4 0 m lo n g a n d 3 2 m w id e .

Under ideal circumstances, HAPS will accommodate payloads weighing 250–450 kg for a variety of military and defense intelligence activities. It will carry out a variety of tasks to support navigation, observation, telecommunications, surveillance, and the provision of information to soldiers in operational theaters. It will be able to support regional navies in patrolling responsibilities and long-term border monitoring, as well as offer surveillance in a variety of fields, including maritime, terrestrial, environmental, and scientific. It will have a ring around it that will enable it to spin to face the sun at all times, with a gas storage capacity of up to 60,000m3. This is enough for a five-year lifetime in the stratosphere, with the capacity of flying missions on its own for up to a year. The HAPS is designed to be fueled by solar energy and green technologies in order to have a low carbon footprint; it will include a solar concentrator on the top and a reversible fuel cell that will provide onboard energy. Due to the fuel cell's ability to store energy, the platform will be able to operate nonstop during the night. Two electric motors will be mounted on either side of the airship. Batteries will power the motors at night, and solar panels will power it and charge them during the day. In order to maximize the use of solar energy, the Gondola movement system, which allows the airship to rotate along its longitudinal axis, will be fitted. After a long wait, Thales has now became the consortium leader of 21 companies that will work on the European-HAPS fund (worth EUR 120-140 million) that starts in January 2023 with the possibly the choice of a “stratoport” in the Canarias

https://youtu.be/zb5G_J6faqk

In the consortium 21 companies, 19 European nations are represented. The companies include small and medium-sized, highly-specialized businesses alongside the larger Thales group. One of them is a multi-disciplined innovative company from Germany, the Stuttgart-based TAO group (an acronym for trans atm o s p h e ric op e r a tio n s ) , w h ic h is c re d ite d w ith c re a tin g th e fi rs t operational HAPS concept. Early in 2001, a brilliant professor, Dr. Bernd Kroeplin, was dissatisfied with the usual model for LTAs and rewrote the tale completely. His fundamental concerns were maneuverability at high altitudes in the absence of wind and, more crucially, how to ascend to the stratosphere despite the interruptions of high winds with the assurance of a smooth, controllable ride up. He worked relentlessly against the grain and created a multi-segment LTA. Undoubtedly inspired by several earth species that have a persistence of movement, he purportedly called it “Skydragon”. They were invited to participate by Thales Europe – the HAPS leader – which was eager to use the steady innovation that this brilliant HAPS pioneer would be able to bring to the table. Their first home flight was in 2011 and you can see the 70meters long size at real scale in their own hangar in an uninhabited part of north Scotland that was appropriate for testing.

TAO’s goal is to be part of key innovation projects on 5G and the upcoming 6G generation of wireless networks, along with enhancing ground-level communications using HAPS. HAPS-to-Ground and HAPS-to-Air

communications are anticipated to be robust in terms of data collecting and computing provided, given HAPS quasi-static location above the stratosphere, important given the pleasant weather and consistent low wind speed characteristic of the stratospheric layer. https://www.tao-innovations.com/wp-

content/uploads/2020/05/skydragon-video.mp4

The first obvious potential area that TAO is concentrating on is a cloud-enabled HAPS in the context of civil telecommunications applications and services, leaving the defense domain to Thales' expertise. HAPS is effectively adapted to develop super-macro base stations and flying data centers. For the purpose of achieving the full capabilities of HAPS, there are problems that must be overcome that involve high energy, processing power quality of service, and security considerations. HAPS must evaluate security AI-based allocations and blockchain machine learning in order to reach maturity. No worry – nothing particularly frightens these clever German engineers!