Sky built a solar-powered platform in Roswell that rides wind currents to hover over locations or travel thousands of miles. It's not a blimp but a High-Altitude Platform System that can carry cameras or telecom equipment. A test flight launching in a month will fly to Japan.
All right, here we are in Roswell, New Mexico. We are in a hangar of a company called Sky. In fact, they may have made this.
Come this way a little bit.
This is neither an airship nor a blimp. They call it a high altitude platform system, and it is meant to do some kind of blimpy and airship things. It goes for thousands of miles. This one is going to take off in about a month and go all the way to Japan, and you can put different payloads in the base of it. You can have cameras to do imagery, you could have telecom equipment to do high-speed internet to places that don't have fiber or other connections. And it flies. It's got a little spot at the back which you can't see right now, but there'll be an electric motor. It's got solar panels on the top, but really it is dependent on the whims of the wind. And so it travels with the wind for thousands of miles. When it gets somewhere it wants to go, it can do what's called station keeping and kind of ride the winds back and forth and hover. And so anyway, it's somewhere between a drone, which can go lower but can't stay in one place, and a satellite, which is higher and can look at one place. But this, this covers this middle ground where you can get amazing pictures, do things on Earth with something that can just hang out in one spot for a long time. Have a look.
