Solar Impulse Grounded Until 2016

An anonymous reader writes: The Solar Impulse 2 has been grounded in Hawaii for at least nine months because of battery damage sustained during its record 118-hour trans-Pacific flight from Japan. The project team says the aircraft is not expected to take off on the next leg of its journey until late April or early May 2016. The BBC reports: "...[the] plane experienced damaging overheating in its lithium-ion battery system. Although the battery units performed as expected, they had too much insulation around them, making temperature management very difficult. Engineers on the project have not been able to make the quick repairs that might allow Solar Impulse to have a crack at completing the round-the-world journey this year."

Comments

Hey Elon!

[xeno]

Hey Mr. Tesla! Surely the Solar Impulse team would be happy to slap a very thin sponsor sticker on a prominent spot, in exchange for Tesla waking up some of its lithium-Ion gods out in the desert. Can't think of a better entity to say "let me look into that" and return 48 hours later with a station wagon full of the latest Li-polymer batteries formed in precisely the right shape with precisely the right chemistry.

Maybe? I know Elon's other team needs a bit of a moral boost at this moment; why not get that boost from the team that's NOT fully occupied doing fault analysis at the moment, and totally qualified to solve this specific energy problem?