NewSpace's High Altitude Pseudo-Satellite Completes Another Milestone — Flies For Over 27 Hours At 26,000 Feet

Bengaluru-based NewSpace Research High Altitude Pseudo Satellite (HAPS) has completed another major milestone, demonstrating an endurance of 27 hours at 26,000 feet.

This is a record for any Indian made HAPS.

HAPS are super lightweight solar-powered drones that fly at very high altitudes of more than 90,000 feet for extended durations.

The NewSpace HAPS is expected to have an endurance of 90 days.

Sameer Joshi, the Chief Executive Officer (CEO) of NewSpace Research, in a post on the social media platform X (formerly Twitter) stated, “The @India_iDEX supported, NewSpace Research & Technologies’ #NRT solar-powered scaled #HAPS platform set a new benchmark of 27 hours endurance and an altitude of 26,000 feet as part of its envelope expansion flight test campaign. This is a new #national #endurance #record for an unmanned aerial vehicle designed and developed in India.”

These HAPS occupy a middle ground between high-altitude long-endurance (HALE) drones and satellites.

They fly higher and for a longer time than traditional drones, while flying lower than low earth orbit (LEO) satellites. Earth observation satellites (EOS) orbiting in LEO can only surveil a specific location for just a minute or so in a single pass.

HAPS, on the other hand, can do so for a very long time. This makes HAPS an ideal platform for surveillance over an area for extended periods.

NewSpace HAPS earlier in December 2023 demonstrated an endurance of 21 hours. The HAPS is being developed under the Innovation for Defence Excellence (iDEX) initiative of the Ministry of Defence (MoD).

The Indian Navy also signed a contract just two months ago (in March) with NewSpace for its HAPS.

This project is being developed under Make-1 of the defence procurement procedure (DPP), where the government will fund 70 percent of the development costs.

Apart from NewSpace Research, the National Aerospace Laboratory (NAL) in collaboration with the Council of Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR) is also developing its own HAPS.

This February, its scaled version demonstrated a flight endurance of 8 hours and 30 minutes at an altitude of 3 kilometres (9,842 feet). The next month, on 11 March, it flew at an altitude of 25,000 feet.

CSIR-NAL also released a video where the scaled model was shown taking flight.