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Flying Wing To Run On Sun-Replenished Fuel Cells
Saint Aardvark writes: "CNN reports here
that a new flying wing is being powered by a combination of solar panels
and fuel cells that suck up 100kWh every *day*. They hope to keep
these(unmanned) babies up for six months at a time -- essentially making
them cheap satellites. The $12 million price tag puts it a little out of
reach for me and thee right now, but just wait 'til they get
open-sourced...:-)" The question is, will this help meet my unbound desire for cheap, ubiquitous, unmetered, wireless Internet access?
A thought occurs to me: Since solar cells need a stable surface area, why not plaster these babies on the top of a dirigible aircraft? Without having to haul fuel, and with the electricity (to spare!) to heat a sizable cabin at high altitudes, it would be conceivable to run airships very, very cheaply.
NASA has a page on previous involvement with AeroVironment, including descriptions of all previous solar aircraft, starting back in 1971 and up to the Helios (the one in this article) and the ERAST program in general. These things have come a long ways in thirty years.
-- Anne Marie
Long-term, cheap, flying surveillance vehicals. Everyone, everywhere, monitored, doing everything. Link them to some computerized systems like FACE in the UK so they can automatically alert the authorities of interesting individuals and situations picked up by various surveilance senses on the flying wing and you've got yet another reason for loving this wonderful country!
---
seumas.com
You can't move a weather balloon. Indeed, it's at the whim of those pesky high-altitude winds ... one of these babies can actually stay in position over a target city, perhaps providing wireless / WAP coverage for the entire area. This makes perfect sense, when you look at the aerial density needed in your typical urban environment : they don't get those roof-top spaces for free, you know. If you could get one of these puppies for $1M to cover Manhattan, you'd save that in the first year alone in wireless basestation leases.
Of course, the math isn't quite that cut and dried, but it still offers tanalising possibilities to wireless service providers. And that's just one possible use with a clear business need.
We already have these devices, except they're called airplanes: expensive to maintain, require refueling, occasionally crash, and when they do crash, they kill people (the pilots). Governments aren't going to stop using them (or stop spying in general), so we might as well make them as cheap as possible both in monetary cost and cost to human life.
Soviet Russia proved that if you want to spy, all you need is a complicent populace to bear the brunt of the spy-work. With these planes doing the work instead of our tenants or landlords doing the work, we don't have to be the ones doing the work. It's ultimately a good thing, comparatively.
-- Anne Marie
It's not the fact they put these technologies on flying wings that's interesting. The conbination of solar panels + clean fuel cells is a perfect source of clean energy for everyone. Such equipment could be put on every roof, or even be used on large areas and be used as a local powerstation.
It's clean energy, with only water as a byproduct. Once the systems get into mass production, their prices will drop sharply. The cost of environmental damage isn't quantifiable and we can't keep on relying on fuel and nuclear power forever.
The applications for such concepts are huge ; from depolluting industrialized countries to the equipment of developing countries by diminishing the power grid infrastrucure.
If you combine this system to fast-spinning flywheels (read this excellent artice from Wired Magazine), you get permanent, clean energy with little or no maintenance as long as the components can last. Heavy industry could rely on fewer heavy-duty (polluting) powerplants, thus greatly reducing pollution (I don't think we can eradicate all of it, unfortunately).
To me, it looks like the ideal power source for durable development.
May I turn your attention to the fact some areas of our planet are becomming unfit to life because of complete ozone layer depletion? It's actually the case in Terra del Fuego, at the southern tip of South America. By getting outside unprotected you get third-degree burn in less than seven minutes. Organic life isn't possible without the ozone layer.
If we don't want that to happen to the rest of the planet, it's urgent some serious investments are made in such technologies.
Think about it.
/max
-- It's always darker before it goes pitch black.
This is a troll using a myth as ammo. That it got modded as insightful is a worry. Here's a good URL for solar myth-busting.
If you want 24x7x365 coverage for a particular geographical area using a satellite, you either need a bird in geosynchronous orbit (which means higher launch cost and more power needed to transmit) or a constellation of low-earth orbit ones. Until we get a cheap way of putting things in orbit, this is the next best thing.
Why is it that the proponents of "one nation under God" are so eager to get rid of "liberty and justice for all"?
Well, you are right, and you are wrong. Imaging (pictures, infared, sidescan radar, etc) is one very good use for this sort of aircraft, and worth the high development costs to both for inteligence gathering and scientific studies (the kind that go into studying the enviornment and wind up helping US agriculture to see paterns that bring more food to your table for example). But that is only the cash cow that is going to get the research done.
The big deal with this sort of system is the ability to selectively "park" it at high altitude over one spot for extended periods of time (the current holy grail is in the two month range), and serve as a communications platform. In simpler terms they want to replace low orbit sateites (*cough* *Iridium* *cough*).
Putting something in orbit cost a lot per pound, and if you make a mistake on something in building the "payload", or something unforseen happens, or if Murphey's Law just rears it fickel head, then you are stuck with what is in orbit. There is just not enough money to go out there and fix satelites in orbit in most cases (Hubbel being a major exception). But if something were to go wrong with a payload on one of these birds all you would have to do is tell it to land, and then fix/replace the payload, and since this costs soo much less than orbiting a satelite, you probably can afford to have a backup waiting on the runway to replace the whole thing.
Now as to the question of baloons/dirigibles, they simply do not have the staying power that this mission calls for. It is hard (impossible) to construct an envelope (the bag that holds the gas) that does not leak, meaning that missions longer than a few days are simply not possible. Add to that the fact that the winds at the altitudes called for in these projects tend to be faster than lighter-than-air-craft have posted in the past, makes them simply the wrong horse to bet on in this race.
It is not about weight, it is about the ability to do the mission at hand.
However, modern solar panels are a no-brainer. Moreover, we need some way of distributed power generation because power transmission from massive generators through ultra-high voltage lines to high usage clumps is undesirable (and not just because of cancer clusters). Solar power also produces power at about the right times (as in most power is consumed during the day).