Nocturnal Labs designs high-altitude aircraft that hold position for days at a time, above the weather and above air traffic, for surveillance, communications and counter-drone defense.
Three ways to get a payload to 20 kilometers and keep it there.
Fixed-wing, long-endurance aircraft that loiter at around 20 km for wide-area surveillance, communications relay and earth observation. Launch, fly the mission, recover, refit and fly again.
High-altitude drones equipped to detect, track and counter unmanned aircraft from above, covering airspace far beyond the horizon of ground-based systems and protecting assets across a wide area.
Long-duration balloons that lift sensing, communications and research payloads to the stratosphere. Small ground footprint, quick to launch, and a fraction of the cost of powered flight.
At 20 kilometers up, the air is less than a tenth as dense as at sea level, the winds are light, and there is no weather and no traffic. It is as close to orbit as you can get without leaving the atmosphere.
Almost all cloud and storm activity stays below the tropopause. Platforms at 20 km fly in clear, stable air with an unbroken view of the ground.
Satellites pass overhead in minutes and aircraft head home in hours. A stratospheric platform can hold over one area for days, giving continuous coverage rather than snapshots.
From 20 km the horizon is roughly 500 km away, so a single platform can observe, or relay across, a region hundreds of kilometers wide.
Launch on demand, bring the platform down for maintenance or a new payload, and send it back up. No launch windows, no orbital mechanics.
Nocturnal Labs is an aerospace company focused on one layer of the sky. We design and build the drones, balloons and ground systems needed to operate in the stratosphere, and we fly them ourselves.
We work with defense, government and commercial customers who need the kind of persistence that satellites and conventional aircraft cannot provide.
Tell us about the area you need to cover or the payload you need to fly, and we'll set up a briefing.
hello@nocturnallabs.com