Aerospace Company Develops Drone That Can Fly Continuously For 5 Years

http://lasvegas.cbslocal.com/2013/10/07/aerospace-company-develops-drone-that-can-fly-continuously-for-5-years/

by sshykes • 13 years ago

99 36 13 years ago

lasvegas.cbslocal.com

AndrewVos• 13 years ago

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

mik4el2• 13 years ago

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• 13 years ago

Is there much weather at 65000 ft?

knappe• 13 years ago

At that height you can see the curvature of the Earth. For perspective here is a picture:

http://imgur.com/I5qQA3D EDIT:

Fair point. The max height on cumulonimbus clouds are 60,000 feet[0]. Effectively there is zero weather.

[0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cumulonimbus_cloud

marvin2• 13 years ago

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.

Game_Ender• 13 years ago

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

samstave4• 13 years ago

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

jcampbell1• 13 years ago

I also noticed the prototype in the video doesn't have solar panels on it.

pepijndevos• 13 years ago

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• 13 years ago

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.

philfreo• 13 years ago

Must be Birds vs. Drones day on HN: http://cl.ly/image/3F0v1f2l3j0Z

TeMPOraL• 13 years ago

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

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.)

samstave4• 13 years ago

It's just too bad that we keep using these amazing thing to spy on, control and kill our fellow humans. Good wor everyone!

fooqux• 13 years ago

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

VladRussian22• 13 years ago

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

samstave4• 13 years ago

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

VladRussian22• 13 years ago

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

"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. "

PhasmaFelis2• 13 years ago

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.

shaundr• 13 years ago

The commentary on that post is frightening.

debt• 13 years ago

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

biot• 13 years ago

That's what balloons are for: http://www.google.com/loon/

wahsd• 13 years ago

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• 13 years ago

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

dudeinforest• 13 years ago

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.... 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• 13 years ago

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.

toblender• 13 years ago

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

aaron695• 13 years ago

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

donaq• 13 years ago

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!

acd• 13 years ago

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/Lunar_Laser_Ranging_experiment

Aerospace Company Develops Drone That Can Fly Continuously For 5 Years

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