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NASA Building Air Traffic Control System For Drones
An anonymous reader writes: Last week, The Guardian got its hands on documents indicating NASA would be working with Verizon to monitor civilian and commercial drones around the U.S. using phone network towers. Now, NASA has confirmed its plans for a drone traffic control system, saying that it wants to help "define" this new generation of aviation. They are testing ways of communicating with drones in flight, both for providing helpful information to drones and collecting information about them. For example, the ATC system could send real-time weather updates to the drones, and inform them of no-fly zones. It could also monitor a drone's battery life and compare its flight path to surrounding terrain. NASA has gathered over 100 organizations to contribute to this project, and they're looking for more. "One of the biggest challenges to integrating UAS into the national airspace beyond line of sight is developing a system that enables the aircraft to see and be seen by other aircraft." This is where the involvement of Verizon and other telecoms is important. NASA is holding a convention next month to develop the idea further.
Iridium, NAV Canada, and other ATC organizations are putting together a global air traffic control system:
http://www.aireon.com/Home
These NASA plans are practically useless and far more likely to hinder the industry than do it any good. Every one of these devices will have a GPS receiver on it, and a terrain map is $10 to integrate. NASA doesn't need to unicast this information - that's just a waste of bandwidth. Any hardware that NASA might want to mandate is already going to be too expensive in terms of components and power consumption to do better than a cellular Internet connection (since they're planning to use Verizon towers anyway) which is already commoditized and ridiculously power-optimized. The aerobots can easily do ad-hoc networking to find their neighbors and avoid collisions - an industry working group is going to have way more information about what those requirements are than NASA might. Aerobot operators have tremendous incentives to not lose their craft, and their insurance carriers will double-down on that; the inclusion of a $5 802.11 radio to handle an ipv6 mesh network in the sky isn't going to ruffle anybody's feathers there.
*Maybe* NASA could be given the job of putting up a web service to keep no-fly zones updated. We'd have to trust their ability to maintain that securely.
The bureaucrats' urge to control everything whether it will help or not ought to be recognized as a treatable mental illness.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
Do you drive? If so do, you want the idiots you see everyday on the road flying over you?
"If any question why we died, Tell them because our fathers lied."
While I agree with another comment that I think this is more likely to hinder the industry, there is a simple answer to your question.
The FAA and FCC are regulatory groups. They're just bureaucracies that pretend to know enough about a subject to set sensible rules for it (and often I question whether that is actually true).
NASA is the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. They've always been involved in actually researching new aerospace related technologies, that's what they're supposed to do. The FAA and FCC are not research/design organizations.