New Mexico's long history with the aerospace industry — a history that includes military testing at White Sands Missile Range and, more recently, Virgin Galactic operations out of Spaceport America — put the state on Mikkel Vestergaard's radar.
Now, close to a decade after he founded Sceye Inc. in 2014, Vestergaard's aerospace company has flown dozens of flights in New Mexico skies, including a successful test of the company's HAPS this week.
Sceye flew its HAPS — or high-altitude platform station — out of its hangar in Roswell Wednesday morning. It's the first time the company has flown since October 2022, when the company tested HAPS' broadband capabilities.
Wednesday's flight is the first in a series of five test flights to mature the platform stations' "launch, ascent and attitude control," Vestergaard told Albuquerque Business First on Friday. During the test flight, HAPS ascended to 65,000 feet above sea level, into Earth's stratosphere.
That's where the platform station would be positioned to track wildfires, monitor greenhouse gas emissions and provide broadband service — Sceye's three primary verticals, Vestergaard said.
"We — and this is the collective 'we' — know very little about the stratosphere because it has historically just been something we go through to go to space," he said. "And so we have often been met by surprises. But we're increasingly seeing that things go exactly as planned, and this is one of those flights where things just went exactly as planned."
The company was able to collect all of the data it sought to collect through the test, Vestergaard added, while reaching its target altitude for this particular flight.
Sceye's platform station acts like a flatbed truck in the air, able to carry different payloads like broadband devices, high-powered cameras or emissions-measuring equipment, David Kim, the company's chief technology officer, told Business First in October before its test flight that month. It's approximately 80 meters long and filled with helium used to ascend to the stratosphere.
As opposed to fixed-wing aircraft, which have to be in constant motion to remain airborne, or high-altitude balloons, which are moved around by the wind, HAPS is geostationary. A ground team controls the platform station's propulsion system to make sure it stays in the same spot, Kim said.
That allows HAPS to deploy its payloads — which can cover around 27,000 square miles — over specific areas. The company partnered with the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and the New Mexico Environment and Economic Development departments to monitor and study air quality in the state.
It's also partnered with different organizations to provide full broadband connectivity to the Navajo Nation.
Vestergaard said Sceye would know more about a full commercial service HAPS start date once it completes the series of five test flights, and added the company would target both public and private partners.
Sceye has 52 employees, of which at least 80% are in New Mexico, Vestergaard said. He added that the company plans to continue expanding its workforce in New Mexico through "high-paying engineering jobs."
Sceye broke ground on its Roswell hangar in 2016 and rebuilt it in 2020 after a wind storm destroyed the facility in 2019. The company is based in Moriarty, where it also has an engineering and operations facility, and it has received Local Economic Development Act money from the New Mexico Economic Development Department for expansion in the state.
This article has been updated to correct the number of people Sceye employs. The company has 52 employees, not 80.
