I've following various reports about alternative-energy powered flight for some time now. It's always interesting, but my excitement has always been muted by the fact that none of them truly seem to work.
The recent news from the Solar Impulse group, has me a bit more excited.
http://www.reuters.com/...
Here is the phrase that rang my bell:
We are on the verge of the perpetual flight
Why is this so exciting?
Well, the main reason we have satellites launched so often is because they have perpetual flight. That is, if you pack a transceiver or other gear into a satellite and put into geosynchronous low-earth orbit, you have a resource that gives you tremendous power and profitability. But the cost so so high that it takes a huge up-front investment.
Well, imagine if you will, a Solar Impulse-like aircraft (or several or many of them), slowly circling the sky, over a small area such as a city or town, or a large area. They would be much more capable of serving functions such as cell phone or broadband networking, broadcasting, mapping, various military or law enforcement functions, and so on, but many of them would be much better (for example, you'd be able to zoom that google map way down), and the cost would be minuscule compared to the cost of a satellite.
And once launched at tied into a remote guidance system, they could fly for months or years, all on energy from the sun. If you needed to service one, you could just land it at a nearby airstrip.
Well, this certainly isn't much of a diary, but I just wanted to share my excitement about what may be a new technological era.
Greg Shenaut