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Sanswire Demonstrates First Stratellite
Sterling D. Allan writes "Pure Energy Systems News (PESN) reports that GlobeTel Communications Corp. debuted their Sanswire Stratellite last week to over 300 people, including members of the media, personnel from the U.S. Department of Defense, U.S. and international commercial interests, as well as investors and shareholders. Stationed in the stratosphere, well above the jet stream, powered by film solar photovoltaic units, the device will make wireless communications available anywhere in the U.S., including on airline flights. One Stratellite will have a payload capacity of several thousand pounds and clear line-of-sight to approximately 300,000 square miles, an area roughly the size of Texas."
Municipal wifi is the dumbest thing I've ever heard of!
Killfile(TGK)
No trees were killed in the creation of this post. However, many electrons were inconvenienced.
interesting.
From TFA: Wireless capability (currently) to an area with a radius of 200 miles.
Is there an increased risk of them bumping into things, like Space Debris?
The press release fails to point out that the demonstration was an abysmal failure and not even the wasteful spendthrifts from the pentagon were interested in putting in an order. Film at eleven.
Now I can download porn on my cell phone at 20,000 feet! And join the mile high jack off club of dateless Slashdotting losers! In soviet Russia, stratalite launches YOU!
This is impressive. Solar powered, but are there weather problems at this altitude? I guess not, but can we put cameras on this thing too. Better maps for google maps, yea. When does it fly by SF again?
"Those that start by burning books, will end by burning men."
Having visited Los Angeles, I was shocked by the routine use of helicopters for chasing suspects. I guess, with this technology, we'll all be tracked by the powers that be.
Is that a Metric Texas or an Imperial one?
would like to ask, haven't we pooh poohed this before?
Straight out of Del boys mouth. "I just got one of those new Stratellite dishes"
It doesn't work at night. ;)
As usual I was reading the summary and skipping about every other line. I do this until I find something interesting to me.
I was quite interested to learn that:
over 300 people, including members of the media, personnel from the U.S. Department of Defense, Stationed in the stratosphere, well above the jet stream.
and I think to myself "WOW those guys are WAY up there"
Obama is a twitter sock puppet
From TsameFA (actually, just the line above):
# Line-of-sight to a 300,000 square mile area
# Wireless capability (currently) to an area with a radius of 200 miles
Radius 200 miles ~= 125,000 square miles, anyway... not sure if that counts as "a lot" less.
And it seems to imply that the wireless capability will eventually be extended to approach the entire line of sight area...
ClutterMe.com - easiest site creation on the Net. Just click and type.
Here is the Yahoo ticker if you are interested:
gtel.ob
MMmmm pi*r2 comes out to about 125,000 sqm
Who is going to be famous for shooting it out of the sky?
They are actually building this Hindengurg. If this thing so much as casts a shadow over my house, there will be hell to pay!
They're planning to use such airships to launch ships into space, by slowly achieving orbital speed!
Can anyone parse,
"...utilizing proprietary lifting gas technology",
in a way that makes sense?
Your post indicates a scatological mind.
What I'm trying to say is, What the hell are you on about, shit for brains?
And a -1 Overrated for using your karma bonus to post the above. Talk about not knowing when to say when.
What happens when this thing malfunctions and falls out of the sky?
"Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives" should be a convenience store, not a government agency.
change the parent post to Funny rather than Informative or Insightful. The AC post was a joke, made up by the AC, me. Any resemblance to factual matters is purely coincidental.
This really adds a new dimension to the term "Vaporware".
Great ideas often receive violent opposition from mediocre minds. - Albert Einstein
No need to worry until they start sniping from the helicopters.
I think he's just got small gestalts.
An amusing and false troll gets moderated +5 Informative, despite the troll's pleas to moderate as a joke. Film at eleven.
Slashdot mods on crack. You don't even want to see this film.
Somehow I don't think it is going to be on a unlicensed frequency.
savethedollhouse.com
"In my opinion, the media is reporting on the progress of Sanswire One as they recognize the potential of our airship and the potential of causing what I always refer to as a paradigm shift in the telecommunications industry."
and here:
"This shows his belief in what we are trying to achieve at Sanswire. His innovative approach and out-of- the-box thinking is enabling us to successfully execute the program."
This is buzzword bullshit completely devoid of meaning, the kind of stuff you tell potential investors when you realize your scheme is gonna cost a whole lot more than you'll ever make. I'm thinking if they actually had a viable business plan you would hear something with a little more content from the CEO.
Well, I tried to mod this funny, but I was told the comment was at its limit. So I tried to make it overrated, so someone could mod it back up as funny, but it said I'd already moderated the comment. Oh well. Damn slashcode bugs.
Ok. I heard a story on this on NPR last week. The comment was made that it would be above the strong winds that could tear it apart. So how do they get it past that level of the atmosphere to begin with?
I'm leery about the system they're showing, if they aren't ready to discuss bandwidth per customer and total numbers of simultaneous connections, etc.
Also, how heavy is it going to be, and how dangerous will it be for something like that, with its 3,000 pound payload capacity, to land for refueling? What if strong winds hit it, and it drifts off course? Have they built their refueling stations far away from population centers, so that if these start to get carried off by the wind, they can drop them more quickly, without running the danger of landing on buildings, etc.? What if they somehow lose radio contact?
The Stratellites are unmanned airships and will be monitored from the Company's Operation Centers on the ground. I wonder what bandwith the connection with ground control would have. For large scale ISP services less than many many Gb/s would be insufficient. Anyone here able to estimate whether such would be a serious bottle neck or not? (I guess they might have just lowered a cable if it wouldn't be accompanied by giant lightning rod like properties)
Read this if you are sceptical about Sanswire claims.
...are these giant jetstream straddling, solar-powered technological oasies available as luxury homes? I imagine with carefull planning you could drag the definition of "hermit" kicking and screaming in exciting new directions.
This Stratelite was on Slashdot nearly a year ago. They are now at a point of almost having a mockup built.
Sanswire has yet to get anything off the ground. Frankly this company and the flurry of press coverage smacks of venture capital investment scam, to me. There's a whole lot of hype and not much substance.
They've been hyping this for years, and while the telecom crash of the early 2000s kicked the chair out from under their business plans, they'd still be really really cool if they ever deployed the bloody things.
By the way, their PR mockup picture of the Stratellite looks amazingly like the whale in the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
thefart.com
"...utilizing proprietary lifting gas technology"
What, a BALLOON?!
in that list of interested parties. But hey, at least this technology will serve the public interest in that it will provide convenient internet access! What a trade! Our privacy for high speed internet access! No wait, even better, trade our privacy for high speed internet access we not only pay for already with our taxes, but pay for again by subscribing to companies like Verizon. And pay for again because these filthy corporations aren't taxed as they should be. Only in America.
I would not doubt it if they were using HYDROGEN. It is cheaper more plentiful and has more lifting power then helium.
I understand the area covered in Texases, but what's this "pounds" of payload? How many VW's is that?
Here's a thought:
If these puppies are to be up there for 18 months (yes, I RTFA), will they comprise a new "environment" that species could adapt to?
The floaty things would make a great rest area for migrating birds or bugs. Birds that migrate at 65K feet, that is. Maybe I should rethink this...
Cloned foods give the statement "We had that last week!" a whole new meaning.
TFA doesn't have much scoop about what was shown other than Sanswire press hype.
Since the picture shows a big hole in the side, i'm guessing nothing actually flew. building a static display is a little more difficult than actually flying at 65,000 feet or even 10,000 feet.
There is a static display of a Moeller at the factory. They will show it to anyone.
This is not about municipal wifi but about stately wifi.
Slashdot mods on crack. You don't even want to see this film.
Seen it? I've LIVED it baby!
Think of how it might have been if they had decided to join the Axis and annihilate your sorry ass instead of saving it.
Doesn't matter how long it took them to decide, in World War II the United States of America saved Europe's ass! If they hadn't, your post would have been in German.
The article mentions that the maximum time in the air for one of their balloons is 18 months, then it's replaced and brought down for "refitting" and then sent back up. The refitting is probably to replenish the helium, or whatever they use -- the site says "proprietary lifting gas technology" (gimme a break). The folks from LiftPort who are developing the Space Elevator talked about this problem with balloons in their presentation at NorWesCon a couple weeks ago. Apparently helium is very hard to contain. One thing LiftPort plans to do to make money while waiting for carbon nanotube technology to develop is to hire out their cable-climbing robots to climb up and do in-flight refueling for tethered balloons. Seems like a neat idea for lower altitude balloons providing similar service to a smaller area.
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=108858&cid=927 4336
There was a slashdot story a while back about this. A guy from JP was answering questions.
This is normal. Just because you can see it doesn't mean that you can talk to it. Line of sight simply means, as the word implies, you can see it in a clear area if you had a telescope/binoculars that were strong enough.
The curvature of the earth would cause the distance from the actual device to become much farther away as you move outward towards the device.
Lastly, a 200 mile radius still covers 125,663 square miles, thats a lot better than anything else we have. May only be a 200 mile radius, but definatly not too shabby compared to what we have now.
"I really wish they wouldn't fill these things with helium, what with the upcoming helium shortage... Helium should be restricted to uses where there is no practical replacement."
Nonsense. I hear there's lots of helium in Iran. Conservation won't be necessary.
Freedom: "I won't!"
Putting two and two together here from the article:
"Each craft will reach its final altitude by utilizing proprietary lifting gas technology."
So it will be floated up there using gas from Balmer? Will be be shouting "Developers" as he fills those gasbags?
Any company that doesn't have the time to simply file the SEC documents necessary to at least be on the OTC Bulletin Board should be a company that is considered a scam at best.
. htmle s/
To see what I mean compare this press release on Yahoo Finance:
http://biz.yahoo.com/bw/050118/185603_1
to this statement to "investors" on the sanwire.com site:
http://www.sanswire.com/sanswiretechnologi
Pure grade A snake oil.
Sanswire is a wholly owned subsidiary of Globetel Communications. (OTCBB:GTEL) There application to the AMEX board should be finalized next month.
Saw the stratellite at Norton AFB last week. Globetel has come a long way with their project. AF and NASA help does not make this a scam. NASA has basically taken over this project now.
Following website has pics of the stratellite taken by a fellow shareholder at the viewing.
http://www.ragnardanneskjold.com/
Never mind whether the thing will fly. Nor whether the radius of the coverage area is 5, 75 or 305 miles. The crucial question with any radio based system is: "how many erlangs can it achieve"?
An Erlang is the name for a full-duplex [telephone] connection. It is a unit of [simultaneous] capacity for a [telephone] system.
The problem you have with [all] wireless systems is the limited bandwidth available and the fact that you run out of it very, very quickly. This is why the cellular approach is so effective (believe it or not). The idea of cellular is that you re-use channels by carefully siting small, low power base stations then assigning your limited pool of frequencies in a specific way so that, with care, you have a scalable system.
In principle, if you need more capacity, you can extend a cellular system by sub dividing cells, using even lower power base stations and replicating the frequency assignment plan.
Any air/space borne system that covers huge areas will have a problem with capacity. There are not enough frequencies and thus channels available to make such a system viable - and that is before you address issues like being obscured (eg in a building).
~125749 sq. miles, actually.
From their FAQ http://www.sanswire.com/faq.htm
1. What about the wind at 65,000 feet? Will it affect the Stratellite
They mention some junk about 1/18 the force of wind on the ground. But gee won't their little blowers (motors + fan) produce way less force to (not sure how it relates to air density). Just seems like marketing crap to me.
Their PR puts a lot of emphasis on the fact that the air density at 65,000 feet is 1/18 as much as sea level. So a high-altitude 60 mph wind has as much force as a sea-level 3.3 mph breeze, and so it doesn't take much force to counteract. But doesn't the same effect apply to the propellers, which will have 1/18 as much "bite", and so need 18 times as much power? Does this in fact scale linearly or are there other wierd effects on propellers at altitude?
Right now it wouldn't matter if one got shot down by a terrorist rocket. But what happens if in the future these things are am important backbone component of all types of communications? Something that large could possibly be a sitting duck. I'm pretty sure that at the moment anti aircraft rockets can't get that high , but thats not to say in the future someone wouldn't develop one that could and if Osamas decendents get hold of some there could be serious problems.
Each craft will reach its final altitude by utilizing proprietary lifting gas technology
Floating? That's VC bait if i've ever seen it.
Next we'll be praising the virtues of pedestrian ambulatory technologies otherwise known as "walking".
-ted
is if they offered the ability to do point-to-point communication with this (eg, not requring you to communicate only with their 'uplink', but allowing say two friends to each get the ground based equipment applicable, and have a high-speed point to point link between them at a reasonable price. Basically, wireless T1. If they are considering that, I think I can smell the phone companies shitting their pants.
Isn't "sans" a french word? Maybe this venture should be renamed something like "Freedom from wires" in order to attract capitals from red-blooded American investors...
Nuffsaid
________
Don't know about his cat, but Schroedinger is definitely dead.
I bet they're using helium...
h tm l
http://www.ragnardanneskjold.com/html/p1010099.
Skiers and Riders -- http://www.snowjournal.com
I am an aerospace engineer. A few thoughts. . .
.) then they have a lift deficit of 3,750 pounds. They'll never get to 70,000 feet. They might get to 60,000 feet, but then they'll only have around 100-pounds of payload capacity available. Plus, the air is denser at 60,000 feet, the propulsive power is greater, the battery weight is higher, etc etc etc.
1. Regenerative power systems (the kind you can deplete and re-charge, whether that be solar cells and batteries, solar cells and closed-loop fuel cells, etc.) need to mature far beyond what is currently capable in order to make these craft work. Consider that the solar panels need to not only power all the essential equipment (radios, drive motors, wifi, etc.), but they also need to have enough excess to recharge batteries for night operations. For something very flat like the Stratellite(TM), this means they won't be able to operate too far north (or south) because the angle the airship makes with the sun will be too great - too few photons will be striking the cells. For the kinds of power densities they will need, this may mean not operating north of New York City, for example.
2. Now consider what happens at night. You have zero solar power - 100% comes from your storage bank (batteries, fuel cells, hyper-flywheels, etc). In the northern hemisphere at winter, you will need to plan on about 16-hours of power storage capacity before the sun gets high enough in the sky to start powering the ship AND recharge the batteries.
3. Assuming the nominal drag coefficient numbers others have talked about (~.05), an average airspeed of 40-knots, and assuming that the electric motors are 90% efficient at converting electricity to mechanical power, and that the propellers are 60% efficient at converting the mechanical power to useful work (thrust), this craft will need 45kW of power available 24-7 JUST FOR PROPULSION at 70,000 feet. 4. Assuming that their regenerative storage system has a power density of 100 Watt-hours per pound (which is optimistic), this equals 7,200 POUNDS OF POWER STORAGE REQUIRED! 5. Again, at 70,000 feet, assuming the structure weighs in at around 1,000 pounds (I'd like to see that. .
This sig is a test. If this had been an actual sig, you would be reading something quite a bit wittier than this now.
Larry Niven wrote about this in his Known Space novels. Of course he used thin envelopes made rigid with stasis fields (in other words, massless structure). The stasis blimps were constructed in orbit, then towed to the ground with spacecraft.
There was nothing marginal about the tremendous potential heat energy that was released when Hindenburg burned. There is also no positive evidence the fire even started anywhere but the deep interior of the tail region, and very clear recent experimental evidence that the kind of material used for the Hindenburg's skin, which has been mythically compared to "rocket fuel," actually burned very reluctantly and slowly. One William Appleby has taken the trouble to simulate that material, and measure its rate of burn. It would take _hours_ for the Hindenburg to have burnt at the rate the skin would burn on its own, and actually the whole ship was consumed, stem to stern, a distance of 245 meters, before it hit the ground about 4 seconds after it started burning.
On other hand, hydrogen is by weight the most concentrated chemical fuel known to burn in air; to release equivalent energy, over 3 times the mass of any hydrocarbon fuel would be required. To be sure, as a gas it is the least dense substance known to exist at standard temperature and pressure, so Hindenburg's 240,000 cubic meters, almost all full of hydrogen, contained only about 15 tonnes of the stuff. Which however would be roughly equivalent in potential heat release to 50 tonnes of gasoline. Furthermore, gaseous hydrogen diffuses more rapidly than any other gas, and has a wider range of flammibility--from 4 percent in air to 78 percent, it will burn. The high rate of diffusion means that small leaks might dissipate quickly, but also that any leaks will establish a density gradient of flammible mix in the air around them that will fill a substantial volume. A small leak inside the Hindenburg's outer hull would mean that dangerous mixtures would exist almost instantly in a large volume near the leak, for the interior was a huge air volume with gas cells for lift floating within it. One spark inside that halo of flammible mix would ingite that whole mass almost instantly, and would indeed cause the very sort of noise that witnesses aboard heard--a sound like a gas stove being lit. This muffled explosion would bring flame straight to the leak in the cell, which would then burn like a torch, igniting neighboring cells and triggering a chain reaction. Every bit of evidence we have says this is what happened; the only argument has been about just how and why the fire _started_. Why was there a leak? Was there one, or did someone plant a small incindiary bomb? But there can be no doubt, the hydrogen released the energy that destroyed the ship in under a minute. No comparable phenomenon would happen if the ship were lifted by helium instead.
It is true that there are bozos claiming otherwise, on the Internet and even on TV. But they are clearly wrong, and I could discuss motives some of these people might have to put out false information. But most people are just flocking mindlessly behind an amusing meme, easily impressed by unsupported claims.
It is also true that a case can be made that heliums' moderate degree of inferiority to hydrogen as a lift gas lowers the margin of success of airships to a critical degree, and that therefore some accidents that have befallen helium lifted airships would not have happened to a hydrogen lifted one. I don't think that is a very strong argument at all. But all the claims for the marginal superiority of hydrogen as a lift gas, and even the fact that hydrogen is cheaper than helium, must be balanced against the simple fact that hydrogen is a very flammible gas, and many hydrogen lifted airships have been suddenly and rapidly destroyed by these flames, and nothing like that can happen with helium, and of course never has. Some helium airships have been burned up in fires driven by their fuel; this has always happened on the ground, either during a servicing accident that set the fuel alight, during disasters such as the terrible hurricane that leveled Richmond, Florida, and the blimp hangar there in late WWII, or _after_ a crash; in the latter cases, crew always had time to escape the relatively slow (though im
And I bet you win that bet. There is no reason not to use helium and many reasons not to use anything else.