61–70 of 206 posts
Why go with heavier than air?
Each has merits, but in our evaluation, if you are able to overcome the aircraft design challenges, fixed-wing offers a far more capable platform. The stratosphere has winds that can exceed 100km/h. With balloons, station-keeping is an enormous challenge. We spoke to a lot of people in the Google Loon project, and ultimately this became a defining problem for them. Airships/dirigibles help a bit, but still have to dr…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Could be catapult launched?
I don't think one could just "throw" something 70k feet up in the air.
https://www.theverge.com/a/mark-zuckerberg-future-of-faceboo...
How does the aircraft get to 70k feet? Is it launched from a separate vehicle?
Winds will be a bigger issue than energy when climbing. Up at 20 km (70k ft.) winds are quite calm, but we need to ascend through more turbulent winds as we climb. We’re sizing our MVP around this.
https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLXvxJNOIXBsM83XxVG7tDUmql...
Does it use PX4, Ardupilot, a customized version of these, or custom firmware? What sort of MCUs and ground station? Are you using an all-in-one electronics sort of unit, or distributed systems (eg CAN nodes, LRUs or w/e) How are you solving the RF communications, ie what sort of range are you getting, and what frequency/transmitters/power level? What sort of range do you expect? It seems like it would be unlimited, other than the RF comms.
Do you have any ethical concerns about the use of your technology for surveillance of civilian populations? That’s the obvious use case for this technology, right? Cheaper and more easily retargetable than satellites. Longer duration, quieter, and more resilient than manned aircraft, but not fast or maneuverable enough to survive in contested airspace. So that leaves large area, long term surveillance in uncontested…
This is a concern for us. As with many disruptive technical advancements (e.g. in Nuclear or AI), there are many ways our technology can be used - both good and bad. It's important to us that what we do is ethical - that means supporting and pursuing use cases with huge positive societal value like rural connectivity or wildfire monitoring. With that said, there are definitely ethically-questionable use cases for thi…
This looks like a great project. Global Hawk [1] has all the current autonomous aircraft records (longest autonomous flight, etc.). Obviously you can't go as fast as Global Hawk, but one great thing is you don't have to worry about all the issues around fuel freezing. To at least some of our surprise, 60k+ feet around the equator was much colder than 60k+ feet around Edwards AFB and we approached the freezing limits…
That record is only ~23 hours because it is a record within a very heavy weight class (14,000 kg+). There are many crafts similar to the one presented here that have done multi-day flights. This one can fly for months at a time: https://www.airbus.com/en/products-services/defence/uas/uas-... . And you can track it real time via ADS-B when it's up there! Speaking of ADS-B, how do you get airspace clearance? And what d…
Very cool. I used to dream of this stuff when I was younger. Reminds me of Atlantik Solar: https://www.atlantiksolar.ethz.ch/ . Hasn't been updated in a while, but focused more on low-altitude autonomous survey missions.