
Aerospace Company Develops Drone That Can Fly Continuously For 5 Years - sshykes
http://lasvegas.cbslocal.com/2013/10/07/aerospace-company-develops-drone-that-can-fly-continuously-for-5-years/
======
dudeinforest
More like "imagines" said drone.

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...](http://www.astrium.eads.net/en/news2/first-flight-of-astrium-s-
zephyr-solar-haps.html). 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.

~~~
bones6
Two weeks is a lifetime compared to vaporware.

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.

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Game_Ender
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.

0 -
[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=If8MODnvjhw](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=If8MODnvjhw)

~~~
samstave
Fake it til you make it with sweet sweet government money (re appropriated
from the citizenry for their own good)

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philfreo
Must be Birds vs. Drones day on HN:
[http://cl.ly/image/3F0v1f2l3j0Z](http://cl.ly/image/3F0v1f2l3j0Z)

~~~
TeMPOraL
I guess this article is here because someone mentioned it earlier today on the
bird thread:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6528099](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6528099)

(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.)

~~~
TheCraiggers
One advantage of birds is that their droppings are easily washed off my car,
unlike the droppings of UAVs.

~~~
omegant
UAV's droppings will wash your car and everybody onboard easily..

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AndrewVos
What an unbelievably shitty website.

Here's a link to the video. Had to youtube it because that site kept on
causing my browser to crash.

[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_TkmZxRTQWk](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_TkmZxRTQWk)

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pepijndevos
I assume the video at the top is of a smaller prototype?

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.

On the timescale of years, something will break or crash, or suffer from
PEBCAK

"you’re paying some dude to watch the payload and make sure the aircraft
doesn’t do anything stupid.”

~~~
na85
It's certainly possible to make bearings and whatnot that last for enormous
lifetimes. It's all a question of cost.

When your buyer is the ridiculously over-funded US Military, you can afford to
charge quite a bit more.

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acd
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.

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Communication_Moon_Relay](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Communication_Moon_Relay)
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lunar_Laser_Ranging_experiment](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lunar_Laser_Ranging_experiment)

------
debt
A fleet of these seems like a great way to provide cheap internet.

~~~
biot
That's what balloons are for:
[http://www.google.com/loon/](http://www.google.com/loon/)

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wahsd
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.

Attack pigeons, anyone?

~~~
Arallu
some kind of Ender's Game version of a distributed network 'game' of attacking
drones w/ other drones I suppose could be fun.

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donaq
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!

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mik4el
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.

~~~
dfbrown
Is there much weather at 65000 ft?

~~~
marvin
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.

~~~
marcosdumay
That's what makes me wonder... How will they keep a plane flying at that
altitude at 68mph? The thinner the air, the faster your plane must move.

(Ok, 250lbs is not that much weight, but you must add the plane's weight. And
it does not have huge wings.)

~~~
marvin
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.

------
VladRussian2
250lb - can carry Hellfire. New incarnation of a multi-month-on-station
[previously nuclear] bomber/cruise missile concept.

~~~
samstave
Imagine these things being able to be re-supplied with munitions whilst in
flight.

~~~
VladRussian2
well, imagination can run pretty wild - instead of Hellfire one can just arm
them with a good 50KWt solid state laser - no resupply necessary:

[http://www.photonics.com/Article.aspx?AID=52628](http://www.photonics.com/Article.aspx?AID=52628)

"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. "

~~~
samstave
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.

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aaron695
Not sure why they're be better than balloons except perhaps to deploy quickly
to a region.

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toblender
All it needs to do now is shoot lasers, this will ensure it can do damage the
entire 5 years.

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shaundr
The commentary on that post is frightening.

