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Aerospace Company Develops Drone That Can Fly Continuously For 5 Years
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- AndrewVos 13y agoWhat 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
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- mik4el 13y agoHow 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 13y agoIs there much weather at 65000 ft?
- knappe 13y agoAt that height you can see the curvature of the Earth. For perspective here is a picture: http://imgur.com/I5qQA3D 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 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cumulonimbus_cloud
- tfe 13y agoTo be fair, in a lot of those "curvature of the earth" pictures, the apparent curvature comes from the wide-angle lens more than actual curvature of the earth.
- marvin 13y agoNot 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 13y agoThat'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.)
- PhasmaFelis 13y agoThe hypothetical craft with the 250lb payload has a wingspan almost as wide as a 747's.
- marvin 13y agoAerodynamic 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.
- mik4el 13y agoCool, thx =)
- Game_Ender 13y agoSo 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 13y agoFake it til you make it with sweet sweet government money (re appropriated from the citizenry for their own good)
- jcampbell1 13y agoI also noticed the prototype in the video doesn't have solar panels on it.
- pepijndevos 13y agoI 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 13y agoIt'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 13y agoMust be Birds vs. Drones day on HN: http://cl.ly/image/3F0v1f2l3j0Z http://cl.ly/image/3F0v1f2l3j0Z
- TeMPOraL 13y agoI 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.)
- samstave 13y agoIt's just too bad that we keep using these amazing thing to spy on, control and kill our fellow humans. Good wor everyone!
- TheCraiggers 13y agoOne advantage of birds is that their droppings are easily washed off my car, unlike the droppings of UAVs.
- omegant 13y agoUAV's droppings will wash your car and everybody onboard easily..
- VladRussian2 13y ago250lb - can carry Hellfire. New incarnation of a multi-month-on-station [previously nuclear] bomber/cruise missile concept.
- samstave 13y agoImagine these things being able to be re-supplied with munitions whilst in flight.
- VladRussian2 13y agowell, 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 13y agoThats 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.
- PhasmaFelis 13y agoHmmm. 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 13y agoThe commentary on that post is frightening.
- debt 13y agoA fleet of these seems like a great way to provide cheap internet.
- biot 13y agoThat's what balloons are for: http://www.google.com/loon/ http://www.google.com/loon/
- wahsd 13y agoI 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 13y agosome kind of Ender's Game version of a distributed network 'game' of attacking drones w/ other drones I suppose could be fun.
- dudeinforest 13y agoMore 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-s-zephyr-solar-haps.html 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 13y agoTwo 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 13y agoAll it needs to do now is shoot lasers, this will ensure it can do damage the entire 5 years.
- aaron695 13y agoNot sure why they're be better than balloons except perhaps to deploy quickly to a region.
- donaq 13y agoAssuming 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 13y agoCan 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