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Daniel, from RCTESTFLIGHT on YouTube, has a series of videos where he experiments with solar airplanes, which wad really interesting to watch from the standpoint of a RC and electronics hobbyist: https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLXvxJNOIXBsM83XxVG7tDUmql...
I work with a startup that's developing tech for very low power consumption RF beamforming; I think HALE applications seems like a natural fit. Feel free to DM if you want to chat.
Fun to see this problem tackled again, I worked at a startup during the boom around a decade ago. Startup failed less than a year (mixture of funding drying up and a shitty founder). Wonder if the technological landscape has changed enough where this is business viable.
This might also be great for coastal/fisheries monitoring. Not sure how that would work exactly or who the customer would be.
Definitely coast guards for the third world, who are resource-constrained when it comes to coastal patrols. Again, no idea who the customer contacts would be.
Are you building a backend for telemetry/etc? If not I'd be interested to talk.
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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…
I'm glad to hear that, I hope you stick to those principles if the police or military come calling. They have deep pockets and your investors will want their 100x.
My biggest concern would be weight & power. This plane only works if it stays light and doesn't use a lot of power. If the military wanted this for live video or EO/IR, how would that communicate with ground sensors? KU satcom, UHF? Will it have IFF onboard, will it meet all the no-single-point-of-failure requirements? Everything the military requires will start using up a ton of power and adding a ton of weight. I get people always think these things will be used for evil, but it isn't exactly easy to take something civilian and suddenly ship it off to some USAF squadron.
So YC is getting into defense contracting now?
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The 24 hour test was with a sub-scale prototype at low altitudes. It turns out that testing a small aircraft in the thicker air at these altitudes matches some important physics of the larger aircraft (Reynolds number). Perhaps unexpectedly, climbing to 20km altitude isn’t too large a problem from an energy perspective. In a typical energy cycle, the aircraft has low battery in the morning, so if we launch with a ful…
Just over 20 years ago, a small model aircraft ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Spirit_of_Butts%27_Farm ) crossed the Atlantic in 39 hours using about a gallon of Naptha as fuel. The same year, the Design-Build-Fly club at my university built an electric aircraft which had some serious endurance and payload capabilities, though I don't remember the details. Keeping a model electric plane aloft for a day is impress…
Didn’t Facebook pursue this idea also? Do you know the details and why they didn’t end up succeeding? https://www.theverge.com/a/mark-zuckerberg-future-of-faceboo...
I worked with a famous engineer who joined Facebook from a well known british aircraft manufacturer. He was an aerodynamics expert and was trying to solve the problems of flutter and other dynamic instability in the extremely large, high aspect ratio, lightweight composite wing.
I wasn't officially told this, but I believe the reason the project failed was two fold:
1. Traditional satellites became cheap enough that high altitude pseudo satellites weren't worth it anymore. 2. Facebook free basics (internet.org) achieved enough success partnering with traditional mobile network operators that it wasn't needed.
I have some pretty crazy anecdotes to share about the project if anyone is interested?