Why use a solar powered plane and not a solar powered airship?
Solar-powered aircraft flown for nearly three weeks without landing
201–210 of 220 posts
Re: Solar-powered aircraft flown for nearly three weeks without landing
#202Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yes. You can think of it as automated stealing. Much of the inequity could be eliminated by imposing a per-transaction tax.
Or you can think of it as HTF trading firms subsidizing 20-60ms internet for the common user. The last couple ms probably mean nothing to you but they mean a lot to them. I guess it depends on what your world view is.
Somehow, I foresee SpaceX just pocketing the extra money, not reducing the little peoples' prices. Have you seen any reason to expect different?
Re: Solar-powered aircraft flown for nearly three weeks without landing
#203Unfortunately the first commercial application of this is likely to be helping loitering munitions stay aloft longer, to lethally target humans. https://www.brookings.edu/techstream/loitering-munitions-pre...
Funny how tech these days end up majority in use either for targeting Ads or warfare or surveillance.
Re: Solar-powered aircraft flown for nearly three weeks without landing
#204Earlier quoted context omitted.
Or you can think of it as HTF trading firms subsidizing 20-60ms internet for the common user. The last couple ms probably mean nothing to you but they mean a lot to them. I guess it depends on what your world view is.
Somehow, I foresee SpaceX just pocketing the extra money, not reducing the little peoples' prices. Have you seen any reason to expect different?
The extra money is probably needed to make the whole thing viable. SpaceX probably has a goal price for consumer plans and they are just trying to hit that price.
Regardless I just don't see SpaceX as the company that doesn't evolve with times tbh.
Re: Solar-powered aircraft flown for nearly three weeks without landing
#205Earlier quoted context omitted.
Somehow, I foresee SpaceX just pocketing the extra money, not reducing the little peoples' prices. Have you seen any reason to expect different?
The extra money is probably needed to make the whole thing viable. SpaceX probably has a goal price for consumer plans and they are just trying to hit that price. Regardless I just don't see SpaceX as the company that doesn't evolve with times tbh.
I do not understand that reasoning at all, where there is any.
"Evolve with times" does not seem to mean anything. In markets where Starlink is viable, they have no effective competition, and can charge as much as the market will bear. As long as they have more potential users than bandwidth to sell them, they are under no pressure to reduce prices or give up profit. A goal to subsidize Martian colonization provides a very strong incentive to maximize income. We should expect to see very high gross margins until other constellations begin to compete.
Re: Solar-powered aircraft flown for nearly three weeks without landing
#206Earlier quoted context omitted.
USD2021$15M per Falcon 9 launch (re-used, assuming first launch was paid for by a customer) [0] 60 Starlink satellites per Falcon 9 launch [1] = + USD2021$250,000 in launch costs per satellite (+ manufacturing / ops costs) [0] https://www.elonx.net/how-much-does-it-cost-to-launch-a-reus... [1] https://space4peace.org/starlink-gears-up-to-launch-nearly-1...
On top of this, if Starship is successful ("fully and rapidly reusable") it could bring the launch cost down another order of magnitude. And because Starlink is building thousands of satellites it has economies of scale that no previous satellite/spacecraft had.
If Airbus is successful, you'd have to compare SpaceX's scale to a similarly massive manufacturing operation of solar-powered aircraft. And you could theoretically make money from multiple sources since the aircraft could carry multiple pieces of equipment. You could make money from being an ISP and from selling imaging services.
Re: Solar-powered aircraft flown for nearly three weeks without landing
#207Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's a good idea, in principle. But according to the sources I could find, to get enough gravitational potential energy to equal the electrical capacity of Zephyr's batteries, you'd have to lift the entire craft by about 70km. https://www.aviationpros.com/engines-components/aircraft-air... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Airbus_Zephyr I can imagine you'd want to take advantage of gravity to a certain extent, but it see…
There's also the fact that this is optimizing for power usage in the air, when really what we'll want to optimize for most likely is power usage while doing some specific task in the air, and that task may necessitate specifics of what altitudes it can function at.
That's the real challenge. Being able to, for example, loiter over a suspected clanlab 24/7 for a month to gather evidence is far more taxing than flying an optimized route.
Re: Solar-powered aircraft flown for nearly three weeks without landing
#208What's the benefit over something like a weather balloon? Pretty interesting thought, tape a few hundred micro SD cards to it and you've got some impressive bandwidth.
You can tell this where to go - weather balloons are utterly beholden to the whim of wind patterns.
And this is more than a theoretical risk...
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/powerpost/wp/2016/04/23/...
Re: Solar-powered aircraft flown for nearly three weeks without landing
#209Earlier quoted context omitted.
You can tell this where to go - weather balloons are utterly beholden to the whim of wind patterns.
Yea I guess I was more thinking of a kind of blimp, where it still has some solar to allow it to maneuver around, but not to actually stay up. If the aircraft needs to stay in one place maybe that would be less efficient though, since it would be harder to fight winds.
You're basically describing the JLENS program, though the lighter-than-air craft was tethered, not free-flying.
Re: Solar-powered aircraft flown for nearly three weeks without landing
#210Complete outsider doubt: Does this has the potential to replace satellites? Or, why did google project loon failed?
I think it would complement, not replace. There are missions that nicely fit the capabilities of UAS, there are missions that nicely fit the capability of satellites, and there are in-between missions that could benefit from long-duration aircraft like this. I live in the east side of Washington DC. We regularly have police helos flying overhead. I wonder if this kind of platform could supplement their efforts for things like tracking escaping vehicles when the police call off pursuit (car chases are frowned upon here due to the fact that they're so dangerous).