Stratoship conducts stratospheric flight

Stratoship has conducted field testing of its remotely piloted high-altitude airship, designed to reduce Australia's dependence on foreign satellites for communications and observation capabilities.

"Our flight on May 5th lasted more than 11 hours including 8 hours in the stratosphere, which exceeded our expectations for this flight," Managing Director and Engineering Lead at Stratoship, Daniel Field, said. "Our roadmap to multi-day flights includes use cases for communications, observation - even fire detection."

The Brisbane-based startup has completed a validation test flight on Monday, 5 May 2025, achieving over eight hours in the stratosphere—an alleged milestone for the developing technology.

"ARM Hub has contributed to Stratoship not just with the network that it offers;  but also helping us with a lot of the research engineering and decision-making along the way", Stratoship Chief Operating Officer, Jennifer Williams, stated. "If we hadn't been at ARM Hub for the past 12 months we wouldn't be in the same situation we are in today."

Created by Stratoship with the support of the Advanced Robotics for Manufacturing (ARM) Hub’s Defence Technology Accelerator, the platform has a wide range of applications. As a participant in ARM Hub’s Female Founders Scale-up Manufacturing Program, Williams will now develop the ship’s real-time livestream capability from the stratosphere.

The test flight was launched in central west Queensland out of Corfield Racecourse, roughly 85km north of Winton. It was launched at 7:55am, the airship reached the stratosphere around 9:00am, maintained stratospheric altitude until approximately 5:45pm, landing at 7:08pm, demonstrating the platform's potential for extended high-altitude operations.