- ARIA is investing £70 million in 18 teams developing aircraft that function like satellites but remain within Earth’s atmosphere.
- The great difficulty lies in keeping the aircraft in position for a week while powering a payload, something no high-altitude platform has hitherto been able to do reliably.
- There is a team attempting to achieve this using a rotorcraft, although ARIA points out that this type of aircraft has never flown at such high altitudes.
Satellites need to withstand rocket launches and radiation, and remain in orbit indefinitely. Advanced Research + Invention Agency, also known as ARIA, believes there might be a cheaper method if an aircraft can remain at an altitude of 15 to 20 kilometres for extended periods.
ARIA is providing £70 million for 18 projects based in the UK, which will last for three and a half years. The aim of each team is to maintain a 300-watt power supply to a communications payload for a week while remaining in a fixed position above the UK. To date, no one has been able to achieve this.
High-altitude platforms, sometimes referred to as “flying satellites” or high-altitude pseudo-satellites, typically last weeks, at most a couple of months, before their batteries run out, they are damaged by the weather, or they drift away. ARIA’s Enduring Atmospheric Platforms programme is currently testing 18 different engineering approaches, hoping that at least one will succeed.
No team has passed the one-week test yet
Rico Chandra, the programme director, divides the funding into three main categories: enabling technologies, such as power beaming and lightweight solar materials; aircraft integration and testing; and the communications systems required for commercial fleets. This allows ARIA to support multiple solutions to the endurance problem simultaneously.
John Mooney of the Leeds-based startup Menapia has proposed adopting a fleet-rotation approach rather than relying solely on battery life. “When it comes to reaching the stratosphere, the vehicles don’t have very long endurance whilst up there, but that problem can be overcome by means of this fleet-level rotation system,” he stated.
“It was entirely unexpected that we received proposals for rotary wing vehicles. My previous understanding of rotary-wing vehicles was that they were inefficient and had very limited altitude capability. That has always been the case, but it is possible to reach high altitudes. It’s just that it has never been done before. The teams are now building aircraft that have never been built before, and that is exactly something we were determined to fund,” Chandra tells Tech Funding News.
VFP Aerospace intends to achieve its one-week endurance target by mass-producing six-axis drones, each constructed by the company’s founder, Andy Cheadle, at a cost of about £50,000 and operated at less than £10 per hour, as they rotate around a 20-kilometre service route.
Space Solar is addressing the power problem by using ground-based radio-frequency beaming. “If we are successful, it will open up new markets in a new type of telecommunications infrastructure. In rural areas it is difficult to provide the high-bandwidth connectivity that businesses need,” adds co-founder and co-CEO Martin Soltau.
Why the budget increased by £20 million
The rise in the budget is due to the rotorcraft proposal and the expenses associated with flight testing. Although the programme was estimated to cost £50 million as recently as December 2025, the most up-to-date figure is now £70 million.
“It’s not easy to work out how costly it will be to book the drone test ranges and obtain the necessary airspace. In the case of an aircraft falling out of the sky, no one is hurt and no property is damaged. It would have been very difficult to arrive at costs for those proposals from the beginning without knowing what they were,” Chandra explains.
He also pointed out that the cost of building stratospheric equipment is not merely the cost of paying people to carry out experiments in their laboratories using the infrastructure they have always had.
Of the 18 teams that have received funding, 16 are located in the UK, while the other two, from Australia and the United States, are moving to the UK as a result of the award.
To be funded, each project had to meet two criteria: the potential for a “trillion-pound socio-economic impact” and the likelihood that it would not proceed without ARIA’s support. A number of highly qualified applicants were not selected because they could obtain funding from other sources.
ARIA does not take ownership of the intellectual property from the projects it funds. For Chandra, success means reducing the risk to the point where telecom operators are willing to invest amounts “one order of magnitude larger” than ARIA’s £70 million.
Not quite like DARPA
ARIA is frequently compared to America’s DARPA, particularly since its former chair, Matt Clifford, joined Anthropic. However, the programme’s requirements are derived from civilian connectivity needs rather than defence considerations, although the UK Ministry of Defence is kept informed to prevent overlap with other government projects, according to Chandra.
The global high-altitude platforms market was valued at $1.54 billion in 2023 and is expected to amount to $2.66 billion by 2030. The need is obvious, and projects such as Europe’s IRIS² network also intend to provide coverage for these underserved users from orbit.
Chandra pointed out that the UK is a technical leader in the field of high-altitude platforms, yet this has not so far resulted in commercial success, stating that “there is not a large, profitable industry based on this technological advantage.”
Whether these changes occur will depend on whether any of the 18 ‘flying satellites’ can remain in the air for a week.
