Strategic reconnaissance UAVs are complex and expensive to manufacture machines that Russia does not have analogues of, only China has prototypes of such a class of machines. In principle, Russia has every opportunity to create a UAV that can stay in the air for about a day or more.
Stratospheric UAV concept
The advantage of strategic reconnaissance UAVs is not only their ability to stay in the air for several days, but also the fact that the pilot of the downed UAV cannot be interrogated due to his absence. Such drones, equipped with special equipment, can be effectively used in the vast expanses of the Arctic and Antarctic.
Pseudo-satellites
Stratospheric UAVs (or pseudo–satellites) are high-altitude drones with the lightest possible design, equipped with electric motors powered by hydrogen fuel cells or lithium batteries recharged from solar panels located on huge wings extending for tens of meters.
It is assumed that stratospheric UAVs will be able to hover in the sky for months at an altitude of about 25 kilometers. It is worth noting that stratospheric UAVs have a much lower “entry threshold” than thousands of low-orbit groupings of reconnaissance, communications and navigation satellites.
They can use commercially available models of batteries and fuel cells that are installed in electric vehicles – their specific capacity is constantly increasing, as huge funds are being invested in this area.
The same is true with electric motors – they are currently developing extremely intensively both in the automotive field and in the field of fully electric and hybrid manned aircraft and UAVs. The efficiency of solar panels is also increasing, their efficiency (efficiency factor) already exceeds 30%.
There is another point – almost all the structural elements of stratospheric UAV hulls are made of composite radio-transparent materials, thus, the visibility of pseudo-satellites for radar can be very insignificant.
Advantages and disadvantages
Stratospheric UAVs can not only carry reconnaissance equipment, but also communication repeaters and even equipment for transmitting navigation signals, a kind of “stratospheric GPS”. The disadvantages of stratospheric UAVs include the impossibility of their operation deep in the enemy’s territory if they have modern air defense systems.
Qimingxing-50 Stratospheric UAV
However, stratospheric UAVs can be very effective when operating along the borders of an enemy country before the start of hostilities or in the area of the line of contact after the start of hostilities, where they can provide highly effective quasi-continuous reconnaissance, relaying communication signals and providing navigation up to several hundred kilometers deep into enemy territory.
And pseudo-satellites can patrol neutral territories, for example, over seas and oceans, as well as brazenly violate the borders of those countries that will be unable to shoot them down. Of course, the flight altitude of stratospheric UAVs, which is on the order of 20-25 kilometers or more, will provide both a longer range of visibility of reconnaissance equipment, the operation of repeaters or the transmission of navigation signals, and their lower vulnerability to anti-aircraft missile systems (SAM).
Currently, medium-sized UAVs are just beginning to become widespread in Russia, for example, the Orion, which, according to open data, are operating quite successfully on the line of combat contact in the area of a special military operation in Ukraine. At the same time, the maximum operating altitude of the Orion UAV is only 7,500 meters.
As for stratospheric UAVs, for example, only the Patriot air defense system can actually shoot down Western-made anti-aircraft missile systems available to the Armed Forces of Ukraine (AFU) at altitudes of about 20-25 kilometers. At altitudes of about 30 kilometers and above, only Russian S-400/500 air defense systems and American ship-based air defense systems have a chance to destroy them.
And what about abroad?
In Western countries, the topic of pseudo-satellites is developing very actively. In particular, in October 2024, the American company Skydweller Aero conducted tests of the Skydweller UAV weighing 2,550 kilograms, with a wingspan of 72 meters, and its payload capacity is 363 kilograms. The body of the Skydweller UAV is made of carbon fiber, and charging is carried out from solar panels.
During the test flight, which lasted 22.5 hours, the Skydweller UAV rose to an altitude of 13.7 thousand meters. It is assumed that in the future it will be able to stay in the air for weeks or even months. The project is being funded by the US Navy, which seems to understand the intelligence value of such machines in the face of the increasing confrontation at sea with China.
Even greater results have been achieved by the British company BAE Systems, which has completed tests of the PHASA-35 stratospheric UAV, potentially capable of staying in the sky for a whole year. BAE Systems calls its UAV an ultralight high-altitude pseudo Satellite (High Altitude Pseudo Satellite, or HAPS). During the tests, PHASA-35 rose to an altitude of just over 20 km and spent 24 hours there.
The PHASA-35 weighs only 150 kg and has a wingspan of 35 meters. On the one hand, this limits its payload, on the other hand, such ultralight UAVs will cost less and can be produced in large quantities, for example, used as communication repeaters or carriers of electronic intelligence equipment.
Even greater performance was achieved by the stratospheric test UAV Airbus Zephyr, which spent 64 days in the air in 2022 at an altitude of over 20 kilometers, powered by solar energy. The Qimingxing-50 stratospheric UAV (Morning Star-50) is also being tested in China, with its first flight taking place back in June 2022.
Equipped with six electric motors, the Qimingxing-50, with a total wingspan of 50 meters, can fly at an altitude of more than 20 kilometers and stay in the air for a long time, including at night.
Conclusions
Stratospheric UAVs or pseudo–satellites are a promising area for the development of unmanned vehicles, and there is nothing extremely complicated about these machines, almost all the technologies necessary for their development and manufacture are commercially available.
There is no doubt that stratospheric UAVs will appear not only in the United States, Great Britain and China, but also in many other countries, such as Turkey, Iran or South Korea. Even in Ukraine, stratospheric UAVs can be developed and produced with the support of Western countries.
At the same time, assembling all the components into a finished, and most importantly, a mass–produced product is a rather difficult engineering task that cannot be solved without numerous tests, loss of prototypes, production debugging and solving many other problems.
By Andrey Mitrofanov
