Stratospheric flights
End-to-end balloon missions to 35 km — planning, payload support, launch, tracking and recovery for science, testing, education and marketing.
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The sky is not the limit.
It's just the beginning.
The stratosphere is an untapped operational domain — above the weather, below orbit. We build and fly the platforms that operate there: balloon missions with Earth-observation payloads, a reusable return glider, and Photon, our solar-powered pseudo-satellite.
Satellites pass overhead in minutes. Aircraft measure endurance in hours. Stratospheric platforms can stare at one place — closer than any satellite, longer than any aircraft — and that changes what Earth observation can do.
Wildfire fronts, disaster zones, borders — keep watching for hours to weeks, not a 90-second orbital pass.
Imaging from 18–35 km — roughly 20× closer than low Earth orbit, so lighter sensors deliver sharper detail.
From decision to airborne in hours, launched from a field site. No launch windows, no boosters.
Missions at a fraction of satellite cost — and with our return glider, your hardware comes back.
End-to-end balloon missions to 35 km — planning, payload support, launch, tracking and recovery for science, testing, education and marketing.
Fly with us →Multirotor and fixed-wing aircraft engineered to your mission — endurance, payload and operating envelope, from brief to first flight.
Design a UAV →CAD and CAM, 3D scanning, additive manufacturing, laser cutting and engraving, and CNC milling — from concept to flight-ready parts.
Visit the workshop →Four altitudes from our own flights — pick one and see what the world looks like from there.
Above roughly 99% of the atmosphere. The sky is black, the Earth's curvature is unmistakable — and the balloon is moments from bursting.
Those services fund and prove the platforms we're building next.
Every flight we sell and every airframe we build is a step toward one goal: solar-powered aircraft that stay in the stratosphere indefinitely. Here's the path — and where we are on it.
Our core service: end-to-end balloon flights to 35 km — mission planning, custom payload design, launch, real-time tracking and recovery. Science, technology testing, marketing and education payloads, flown routinely from Partizánske Airport (LZPT).
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A balloon-borne EO payload with a live video downlink — bringing real-time imaging from the stratosphere to the ground station as it happens. The first building block of our Earth-observation capability, flying on our own missions.
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A fully autonomous glider that detaches at altitude and flies your payload back to the launch point — making meteorological probes and stratospheric experiments reusable. The first prototype flew 8 missions in its first year, including an autonomous return from 32 km. Now in development: a custom flight controller and a purpose-built airframe.
Explore the glider →
A long-endurance solar reconnaissance UAV with EO imaging and satellite downlink for live video beyond line-of-sight. Primary focus: forest-fire monitoring — with dual-use reach into defence applications. Building on solar experience from a successful prototype.
Discover Phoenix →
A high-altitude pseudo-satellite designed for multi-week persistent flight at 18–20 km. Photon ties everything together — the avionics, the comms, the recovery systems — into a self-sufficient stratospheric ecosystem for Earth observation, ISR, environmental monitoring and resilient communications.
Discover Photon →
Stratospheric flight demands electronics that survive extreme cold and near-vacuum. We design and build our own — purpose-built for the platforms we fly.
Straton Technologies is a pioneering startup founded by a team of aerospace enthusiasts at the University of Žilina. Our mission is to push the boundaries of high-altitude exploration and unmanned aerial systems.
"We believe in progress by hands-on testing, iteration, and real-world results — not just theory alone."— The Straton team
