Sceye high

Good morning. It’s day one of our Space & Defense Investor Summit and the team could not be more excited about the incredible lineup we have this year. (You could call it the Coachella of space and defense tech.)

Not able to attend the Summit? You can still join us for the Investor Summit closing party on Nov. 4. Details here.

Today's newsletter:
🎈 Sceye, SoftBank sign HAPS-fleet deal
🏜️ Tumbleweed targets reentry with €6.9M seed
💫 In other news

Launch of Sceye’s Service Test 1 mission. Image: Sceye

As satellite operators stress over finding launch slots, Sceye wants to put cell towers in the stratosphere in under 30 minutes—no rocket required.

Sceye signed a five-year, master-services agreement with SoftBank to manufacture, launch, and operate a fleet of Sceye’s high-altitude platform systems (HAPS) over Japan, the companies announced today.

At roughly 20 km in the air, the companies see HAPS as a stratospheric bridge between terrestrial communications infrastructure and satellite networks.

“This is not a competition between the stratospheric layer or the LEO layer…both layers are required to make sure that nobody is left behind,” Sceye founder and CEO Mikkel Vestergaard Frandsen told Payload. SoftBank is also adopting Starlink’s direct-to-cell service in Japan.

In the forecast: The agreement builds up to “a very significant fleet of at least 40 units” over five years, Vestergaard Frandsen said. Sceye will own and operate the platforms and sell SoftBank the service. Most of the fleet will provide mobile broadband, and a subset will form a free-space optical (FSO) laser network in the stratosphere.

SoftBank backed several HAPS efforts before putting $15M into Sceye’s Series C in 2025. It invested once Sceye became the first to “close the power loop,” holding altitude with its platform over the same area through the night until the sun came up to recharge its batteries, according to Vestergaard Frandsen.

Round trip: In September, Sceye completed its Service Test 1 mission with SoftBank, which spent 30 days traveling from New Mexico to Japan and back, testing several HAPS applications.

• SceyeCell, Sceye’s “cell tower in the sky,” delivered texts, voice calls, Internet, and video streaming directly to standard phones, including indoors.
• Sceye demoed stratospheric laser ranging, which involved tracking a HAPS from the ground,and laid the groundwork for the FSO network.
• Edge-computing tests aboard the platform reduced latency by 40% compared with cloud computing, according to Vestergaard Frandsen.

Liftoff: Sceye pitches its platforms as complementary to satellites and terrestrial networks, but its ability to get in the air offers a possible alternative to operators worried about a launch crunch. Sceye’s platforms are able to reach their cruising altitude in under 30 minutes, using lifting gas.

“It’s just a massive strategic upside that we are completely independent from other companies’ launch vehicles, and have our entirely own setup that is fully integrated,” Vestergaard Frandsen said.

Sceye compares its platforms to GEO sats—with the ability to maintain a consistent altitude and area of operation— just 1,800x closer to the Earth’s surface, replaceable, and serviceable.

However, Sceye’s current flight record is only 30 days, and recovered platforms are currently broken down and tested before parts are reused, with a turnaround time currently “in the months.” Vestergaard Frandsen wants to see that time cut down to weeks, with single vehicles remaining in the sky for six months or more.

In Partnership With Vast

Building next-generation space stations and space infrastructure

Vast is developing next-generation space stations and space infrastructure using an incremental, hardware-rich, and capital-efficient approach, beginning with Haven-1, targeted to be the world’s first commercial space station.

Tumbleweed Raises €6.9M to Build a Reentry Vehicle

Rendering of Oasis Beta. Image: Tumbleweed

Vienna-based startup Tumbleweed is attempting to build an anti-gravity machine—one that looks strangely like a reentry vehicle.

Today, the company announced the closing of a €6.9M ($7.7M) seed round to fund the development of an in-orbit research vehicle—called Oasis Beta—that will be capable of reentering the Earth’s atmosphere, with missions set to begin in 2028. The round will also fund at least three missions in 2027 of Tumbleweed’s Pod payload.

Pact VC led the round, with additional participation from Vanagon Ventures, Prototype Capital, EWOR, and a group of angel investors, including SES cofounder Candace Johnson.

Return journey: The round comes hot off the heels of Tumbleweed’s first in-space mission. The company sent its first sat—Oasis Alpha—to orbit on SpaceX’s Transporter-17 rideshare in July. On that mission, the sat demonstrated its ability to host microgravity research payloads from four different customers.

Since then, Tumbleweed has seen an influx of demand from customers looking to access microgravity without building a satellite of their own. Tumbleweed specializes in giving space newbies their first ride to orbit. Company officials said Tumbleweed’s decision to build its own reentry vehicle was driven not by a bid to create a best-in-class capability, but by an urge to smooth the path to space (and back) as much as possible for future customers.

“It is very consistent with our ethos of space being as much in the background as possible,” CEO Julian Rothenbuchner told Payload. “No one gives a shit about space for us, [so] we’re optimizing for maximum credibility outside of the space industry.”

Rothenbuchner said Tumbleweed is evaluating partnerships with other reentry vehicle providers, but building Oasis Beta in tandem to own more of the value chain.

Tumble up: Tumbleweed isn’t waiting to finish Beta before it flies again. The company has three flights booked in 2027, including both suborbital and orbital missions.

On at least one of the upcoming missions, Tumbleweed will attempt to demonstrate its ability to integrate payloads late in the launch process. By bringing this late-addition capability to the market, Tumbleweed hopes it can open the door for new types of in-orbit research missions that depend on live samples, or payloads that can’t sit on the shelf for weeks ahead of a launch.

“It’s a technical feat for sure. It’s also very much a procedural feat,” Rothenbuchner said. “What we are basically pushing super-hard for in this market is to be the most actionable ones. To be the ones where—with minimal effort [and] minimal cost—you can launch something tomorrow.”

In Other News

📝 Contract report:

• Interstellar Technologies received a launch-funding grant of up to ¥12B ($76.2M) under JAXA’s space strategy fund.
• Orbital Lasers signed an R&D contract with JAXA for an in-space lidar demo aboard a future HTV-X mission.

💫 Other news:

• China says it wants to put taikonauts on the Moon before 2030.
• Gebrüder Weiss announced recent Mars-analog-tech demos with its partners.
• NASA’s new report says its Mars Maven mission, operating past its design lifetime, was lost due to a radiation-induced fault or a software issue.
• Inversion Space unveiled a reentry flight computer.
• Voyager Technologies named retired Gen. B. Chance Saltzman chair of its board of advisors.

The View From Space

Credit: ESO/A. Berdeu

These streaks in the starry image aren’t satellites—they’re artificial stars generated by an ESO telescope. The organization’s Very Large Telescope in Chile shot lasers to help with focusing on the target, which was a supermassive black hole in galaxy NGC 3227 at right.

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