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Unmanned Aerial Telecom Relays
Brussel writes "SkyTower in collaboration with the Japan Ministry of Telecommunications (CRL/TAO) and NASA has successfully completed a series of commercial telecommunications tests -- the world's first from more than 60,000 feet in the stratosphere. The tests, which began three weeks ago, were conducted from Pathfinder-Plus, an unmanned solar-electric aircraft developed by AeroVironment." There's another press release here.
...will involve planes falling from the sky
call it Skynet :)
We know what then may happens...
i'm no sure many coustomers will want to 'wait for the next flight' to get their buisness done
I think that would be quicker than waiting for a repair crew when a car hits one of the landline boxes the towers are hooked up to.
As x approaches total apathy I couldn't care less.
Yes they would; lower fuel consumption, much greater endurance, less risk of a catastrophic failure - and lots of area for solar cells that can help power the relay.
You have to design a special ship, normal airships fly relatively low and their useful load drops off quite rapidly with altitude. You have to think about building BIG for quite a small payload. Then consider things like reliability, redundancy and UV light eating away at the envelope. But it should be doable.
A British company, the Advanced Technology Group is prototyping just such a relay. It's called StratSat and the prototype could fly in the next year or two.
Best wishes,
Mike.
They can overlap coverage from multiple planes to provide redundancy. They can even move planes remotely to fill gaps in coverage.
Could these platforms be mounted with catalysts to remove chemical pollutants?
Beta is broken and the link to classic doesn't work. Stop wasting our time or there won't be anybody left here.
Not enough lateral thinking.
. ht m
http://www.airship.com/prod/stratsat_sub_frames
Government of the people, by corporate executives, for corporate profits.
Kind of like a fibre run getting hacked by a back hoe? Only, that happens frequently and is out of the telecom company's control. This critter would be 60,000 feet in the air and out of reach. The only thing that could bring it down would be the operator's incompetence. That's a darn sight better than today's situation with fibre where anyone's incompetence could make for a bad day.
Besides, what could bring it down? Its 60,000 feet in the air! Above damned near everything in the sky except maybe an SR-71 and the ISS. It would have to be a mechanical malfunction, or oops we forgot to fill the tank.
As for affecting the customers, I don't know of any backbone, which this would be essentially, that isn't fault tolerant. I suspect they will fly redundant drones or have overlapping service areas.
Not only are they working on building a large, long-endurance airplane, they're also working on a small, short-endurance spy plane. The basic idea is you take a briefcase to where you're interested in looking at something, open the case, set up a small antennae and launch a little hand-held plane to go snoop around. There's a paper on how they built the plane near the bottom of this page.
These machines are environmentally friendly, inexpensive and makes the telecommunications infrastructure more resilient.
The plane doesn't even use stored power - it uses solar power to fly and power the telecom equipment. I am amazed, but also slightly skeptical that there will be enough power available to both fly for 6 months and power the payload, and store the surplus energy overnight. That especially applies to the extreme north and south where daylight is scarce and at an extremely low angle during the winter.
If this turns out to work, it's a major breakthrough. It will provide both urban areas with scalable telecom soluitions, and provide the less densely populated areas with modern telecom facilities. This applies especially to the developing parts of the world where the current infrastructure is abysmal.
All I worry about is if someone sees this as a threat, and manages to shut down the project in some ingenious way.
Stop the brainwash
Don't get me wrong, it'll be wonderful if the company can pull this off. It just looks like there are an awful lot of unanswered questions as to what it'll be like up at that elevation for extended periods. If I were starting up an isp based on the technology, I'd make it clear to my customers that there may be black out periods when I bring the planes down to avoid losing them to a major storm. The tradeoff is when the planes are up, they'll get terrific throughput. 98% uptime may be good enough for most people. For the 99.999 crowd, they could use the service to supplement whatever they're doing and fall back to slower circuits during a storm.
There are a series of amateur radio satellites in orbit sponsored by members of The Radio Amateur Satellite Corporation and other organizations worldwide. They are free to use worldwide by anyone holding an amateur radio license. Most of these satellites are in low earth orbit, which means that they may make several passes a day. It does not take much to get started. You can communicate with other radio amateurs through these satellites with nothing more than a handheld antenna pointed at the sky and a handheld radio clipped to your belt. I use this antenna.
Yes, I know that I can whip out my cellphone and talk to anyone with much less effort. But I am a geek and this is much cooler (and fun!)
If you are in the U.S. check out the American Radio Relay League's web site for more information on getting licensed. If you are outside the U.S., check the above web site for information on getting licensed in your country. It's easy!
.... some idiot is going to combine this with an advertising banner. The skys, thirty years from now, will be filled with advertsising. Even at 30,000 - it would be economical to tow a *huge* fabric banner thats visible from the ground....
ugh.
Moneyed corporations, non-working 'poor' and criminal prisoners are turning productive citizens into tax-slaves.
These machines are environmentally friendly, inexpensive and makes the telecommunications infrastructure more resilient.
Something that's desperately needed right now. The whole US internet infrastructure is only running now by the blessing of the court system, a court system whose wisdom is hit-or-miss at best. Not that I'm hoping WorldCom survives, I just want it to survive long enough for a bunch of smaller competitors to buy up the pieces at bargain bin rates.
Any technology that provides alternatives for getting on or running the internet gets a big cheer from me.
It's rare that you're presented with a knob whose only two positions are Make History and Flee Your Glorious Destiny.
NASA's Flying Wing Breaks 2 Records (Aug'01)
NASA Send One Up... (July'01)
A while back I was able to go to Dryden Flight Research Center and see the Helios and talk to one of the head engineers about the project. The plane itself has a huge wingspan, larger than that of a 747. I don't recall the exact figure, but I'm sure you can find it on NASA's website. As several people have commented, it is better structurally for the wing to be very flexible. This allows the plane to absorb shock encountered in flight, with an instantaneous shock resistance of > 30g's. At that time, the idea was to operate the plane at an altitude of 120,000 feet, which would put it above most weather. There is some risk involved with takeoff and landing, but this is true for any aircraft. Besides, a Helios flight may last up to 60 days, which gives leeway to plan takeoffs and landings around weather conditions. The real advantage of the Helios over a satellite is maintenance. If the electronics in a satellite fail, there are few options for fixing or recovering the satellite. At a cost of over $80 million a pop, that's an expensive risk. With a Helios, which may cost around $3 million, servicing the payload is much easier. The plane itself has such a low glide ratio that in the original tests, they shut off the engines at night and let the plane glide. It only lost about 15,000 feet over an 8 hour period. In the morning the engines would come back on and the plane would regain altitude in a couple of hours. I am not sure if they still do that, but it's a great way to conserve electricity for use with a payload. Anyway, should the engines fail there is plenty of time to land the aircraft. I'm excited to see these successful test flights, as there are many benifits the plane could provide. The obvious application is cellular phone coverage, but at a much lower cost. This means extending cellular coverage to areas of the world that are underserviced by current telecommunications satellites (i.e., a large portion of the African continent). It is also possible to transmit power via a microwave radio signal, thus these could also be used to provide electrical power to very remote areas. The Helios won't, and shouldn't, replace current infrastructure but it may be a great tool for meeting the challenges of technological development in underdeveloped parts of the world.