More like "imagines" said drone.<p>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.)<p>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.<p>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: <a href="http://www.astrium.eads.net/en/news2/first-flight-of-astrium-s-zephyr-solar-haps.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.astrium.eads.net/en/news2/first-flight-of-astrium...</a>. This is a real engineering team with real money, real development and a real engineering feat.<p>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.
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.<p>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.<p>0 - <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=If8MODnvjhw" rel="nofollow">http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=If8MODnvjhw</a>
What an unbelievably shitty website.<p>Here's a link to the video. Had to youtube it because that site kept on causing my browser to crash.<p><a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_TkmZxRTQWk" rel="nofollow">http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_TkmZxRTQWk</a>
I assume the video at the top is of a smaller prototype?<p>Making something that flies on solar power is not that hard, but I wonder how they are going to deal with mechanical and electronic failures.<p>On the timescale of years, something will break or crash, or suffer from PEBCAK<p>"you’re paying some dude to watch the payload and make sure the aircraft doesn’t do anything stupid.”
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.<p><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Communication_Moon_Relay" rel="nofollow">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Communication_Moon_Relay</a>
<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lunar_Laser_Ranging_experiment" rel="nofollow">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lunar_Laser_Ranging_experiment</a>
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.<p>Attack pigeons, anyone?
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!
How will the drones handle bad weather if they're continuously operational? They're not really quick so they can't outrun all kinds of weather.