High-altitude flight is getting increasing attention from sectors ranging from telecommunications to emergency response. To make that airspace more accessible, NASA is developing an air traffic management system covering those altitudes and supplementing its work with real-time data from a research balloon in Earth’s stratosphere.
Aircraft at high altitudes – 50,000 feet or higher, or roughly 10,000 to 20,000 feet above most commercial traffic – offer new possibilities for delivering internet connectivity in regions in need of reliable service. And they can deliver unprecedented situational awareness for the ground below, providing early warnings for floods and other disasters.
For these types of operations, “station-keeping,” or remaining in the same region for extended periods of time, can be ideal for aircraft including balloons and airships.
These flights will require a different sort of air traffic management system from the ones that cover most commercial flights – and it needs to be dependable. That’s why NASA is working to produce a system that ensures aircraft can operate safely in high-altitude airspace, with a particular focus on station-keeping.
“Current high-altitude air traffic management is manual and piecemeal,” said Jeff Homola, researcher at NASA’s Ames Research Center in California’s Silicon Valley. “We saw the need for a scalable solution – something multiple operators in a shared airspace can safely rely on. Our system provides shared awareness of the airspace, identifies potential conflicts, enables cooperative conflict resolution, and allows operators to complete missions safely.”
NASA’s expertise and technology, and the agency’s knowledge of the needs of the aviation industry, put it in an ideal position to perform the work. And NASA researchers are collaborating with the companies Aerostar and Sceye, developers and operators of high-altitude aircraft, to evaluate the system.
“We’re leveraging decades of NASA’s air traffic management expertise to make this possible,” Homola said.
This NASA system enables operators to share live flight data, information about their flight plans, and potential conflict alerts. Based on this information, operators can coordinate flight plans in real time. During a 2025 simulation at NASA Ames, researchers tested how efficiently that data sharing would be among operators of lighter-than-air vehicles – both balloons and airships.
For this test, NASA, Aerostar, Sceye acted as operators of high-altitude vehicles, sharing information from facilities in California, South Dakota, and New Mexico. They were able to share flight information, as well as telemetry data from an Aerostar stratospheric balloon floating 66,500 feet above Sioux Falls, South Dakota, at the time of the testing.
The simulation built on earlier tests, adding improved flight-intent visualization, conflict detection, and, for the first time, live flight data from the balloon.
NASA researchers also studied how operators make decision when planned aircraft trajectories overlap, which will help refine essential rules and guidelines for safer high-altitude airspace operations.
For decades, NASA has biggest air traffic management challenges facing the National Airspace System. NASA innovations have helped cut fuel consumption, prevent accidents, enable precision navigation, and lay the groundwork for today’s modern air traffic management systems. This specific work builds on the initiatives focused on drone operations.
NASA will share results and lessons learned from the simulation with the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) to inform its approach to ensuring that higher airspace operations are accessible, safe, and scalable.
The agency will continue advancing the high-altitude traffic management system through continued collaboration with industry partners and the FAA. NASA’s goal is to create a framework that opens the door to new commercial, scientific, and humanitarian missions.
This work has been supported through NASA’s Air Traffic Management Exploration project. The project is part of the agency’s Airspace Operations and Safety Program within its Aeronautics Research Mission Directorate.
