HeliNet: project status and the way forward

The HeliNet project has been funded by the European Union for the period 2000-2002, and concerns the development of a network of stratospheric platforms for telecommunications, navigation and remote sensing. The first year of activity has lead to the definition of the long-tern system objectives, as well as preliminary specifications of the platform structure and payloads. In particular, in this paper we give an overview of the current status of the project. We address system integration issues, which involve interfacing the payloads and the aeronautical structure; moreover, we report current activities in a few major application domains, namely navigation and remote sensing.