There are many companies involved in manufacturing solar drones; most of the industry heavyweights are in on the action. This company is not one of those. They have a small-scale prototype and are claiming a 60m wingspan (enormous), 65,000-feet-flight for 5 years. NASA among others haven't gotten a month. The model they have is a glider with solar panels. There is literally nothing new here besides the marketing. (They also didn't coin "atmospheric satellite", that goes back decades; AeroVironment had a company with the same concept in the 90s.)
This is a small group out of New Mexico with minimal funding and experience making wildly exaggerated claims. Five years is just laughably irresponsible for anyone involved in aerospace engineering.
In real engineering news, Astrium bought QinetiQ's solar UAV Zephyr program, and outlined last month an actual two-week high-altitude 70,000-foot solar flight here: http://www.astrium.eads.net/en/news2/first-flight-of-astrium.... This is a real engineering team with real money, real development and a real engineering feat.
Notice the lack of "five years" linkbait in Astrium's press release... which is why it wasn't spam-posted all over the web this week.
It's interesting engineering that should keep improving as photovoltaics and batteries improve. A fleet of these sun chasing giant satellites that don't need to come down(but can if necessary)? It's like a Dyson swarm, except on a lot more manageable altitude.
So this looks pretty cool, and their marketing department already coined the term "atmospheric orbit", but their aircraft currently looks like vaporware. All of their videos are pre-rendered and the short clip in the article is too [0] small to be the aircraft they are trying to sell.
It also raises some flags when their quotes are from Senators and their "social proof" logos aren't customers they are supplies of the components they are using.
(In drone vs. bird I'm all for UAVs! ;). I know that birds are more advanced / sophisticated pieces of technology, but drones are ours, made by humans. Regardless of all the unfortunate military application, I feel proud for humanity that we keep on inventing more and more amazing things.)
Can this give us cheaper world wide internet coverage? I have also been thinking of using the moon as a satellite laser relay, latency would be 1.2sec but you would get internet.
I think it's time to get into the counter drone systems business. What's an easier target than a drone that flies for five years or just simply continuously. I wonder how much the cartels would pay for systems that can detect, track, and integrate with a means for "dealing with them". No, not necessarily in a destructive manner.
Assuming this is not vapourware, it's awesome! It carries 250 pounds, which is ~113Kg. So I'm like 80Kg or so. That leaves about 30kg, which is almost enough for a month's supply of food. If we can build a system of balloons to periodically float up supplies, we can seriously just live in the sky and have wild adventures!
To be fair, in a lot of those "curvature of the earth" pictures, the apparent curvature comes from the wide-angle lens more than actual curvature of the earth.
Not really. Thunder clouds usually top out around 60.000 feet. There are some wind phenomena that could reach this high, but mostly I think it's calm at this altitude. The air is so thin you would have to have very strong winds for there to be a problem.
Aerodynamic lift (in Newtons) is proportional to airspeed and invesely proportional to air pressure. So is aerodynamic drag. This holds true up to the transsonic region; ~800 kph of true airspeed. As long as you're subsonic, it's sufficient to have the same amount of thrust as at low altitudes, and you'll keep flying at the speed required for lift >= aircraft weight.
Granted, this will require proportionally higher propeller RPM, but with electric engines this is unproblematic. You'd get in trouble with hydrocarbon engines though, since you need the same amount of oxygen to generate power. So at altitude, you'd need a turbocharger or similar machinery.
Hmmm. How much damage could a 250-pound fin-guided kinetic penetrator do, falling from 12 miles up? Could you kill a tank with that?
Not much good for blowing up wedding processions, admittedly. But it is interesting to think about. I don't think you'd want a stock Hellfire for a vehicle like this. Whatever the payload, you're probably looking at something more like a guided bomb than a missile.
"The device cut through a 15-mm-thick steel girder at a range of 1000 m, shot down several diving target unmanned aerial vehicles at a range of 2 km flying more than 50 m/s, and engaged an 82-mm-diameter steel ball representing a mortar round and traveling approximately 50 m/s. "
Thats amazing. Imagine also when we get good graphene super-capacitors that are smallish and light-ish and we can fill the wings with them. Trickle charge them with solar power and have each one large enough for a burst of that laser - and it can charge over time and then have a battery of burst avaialable to it.
There are many companies involved in manufacturing solar drones; most of the industry heavyweights are in on the action. This company is not one of those. They have a small-scale prototype and are claiming a 60m wingspan (enormous), 65,000-feet-flight for 5 years. NASA among others haven't gotten a month. The model they have is a glider with solar panels. There is literally nothing new here besides the marketing. (They also didn't coin "atmospheric satellite", that goes back decades; AeroVironment had a company with the same concept in the 90s.)
This is a small group out of New Mexico with minimal funding and experience making wildly exaggerated claims. Five years is just laughably irresponsible for anyone involved in aerospace engineering.
In real engineering news, Astrium bought QinetiQ's solar UAV Zephyr program, and outlined last month an actual two-week high-altitude 70,000-foot solar flight here: http://www.astrium.eads.net/en/news2/first-flight-of-astrium.... This is a real engineering team with real money, real development and a real engineering feat.
Notice the lack of "five years" linkbait in Astrium's press release... which is why it wasn't spam-posted all over the web this week.