Drones vs. balloons: Zuckerberg explains why wings are better for the internet | Hacker News Reader

Drones vs. balloons: Zuckerberg explains why wings are better for the internet

gigaom.com

26 pointscr4zy9 comments

The atmosphere is really thin at 65k feet.

Considering the solar impulse was only able to achieve 36 hours aloft, and has a service ceiling of 39,000 feet, it is going to take a lot of technical and material breakthroughs for these drones to operate at 65k feet for months.

Not impossible, but people should realize that this will realistically be launched in something like 2025 or 2030, not 2016.

Of course, come 2025, the world may not need to have the internet blanketed on it by drones.

If you just need a bigger propeller to work that altitude, just make it out of rigid inflatable Kevlar or something.

Aside from that, with a large enough wing surface area, you get enough resistance to falling downward that you don't need much power to stay aloft (think about how a parachute works--with rigid wings there is resistence to altitude changes as long as you stay parallel to the ground).

It might be hard to climb to the altitude, but you can just airdrop from another plane and also forgoe landing gear.

> This is also close to the lowest altitude for unregulated airspace

I always find it fascinating how innovation gravitates to unregulated places. I think about radio spectrum - look at the incredible value we get from the 2.4ghz band - for me personally it feels like that small piece of spectrum gives me more than all the rest of the spectrum put together.

And similarly here - what is the primary constraint both Google and Facebook are working with? Just to get out of regulated air space. The problems of trying to deal with regulation are worse than all the technical issues put together. And I suspect that just like with unlicensed radio spectrum, it will work out ok and we'll end up getting far more value from unregulated air space just like we do from unlicensed radio spectrum.

2.4ghz is heavily regulated in the US. Did you mean public domain vs privately owned or something?

yeah, my comparison is a bit loose, I'm linking "unlicensed" and "unregulated" to each other.

Of course 65,000' is where the U2 operates :-) I'm a bit skeptical on the 'high power' though. Transmitting at 100W takes probably closer to 500W of power and your drone/airplane has to stay aloft as well. All of that would seem to make for a pretty tight energy budget.

For a bit about how the U-2 flight regime is ... delicate: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coffin_corner_(aviation)

I wonder what the actual purpose of this project is (and whether such purpose is known even to Facebook today). I really doubt that either Google or Facebook really intends to use aircraft to provide Internet access, just like I doubt that "Speed enforced by aircraft" is ever true. I do think that UAVs are definitely a "next big thing" and both of them want to develop lots of UAV technology for yet-to-be-determined applications.

Drone vs. Balloons I choose cables. It's the most reliable, and cheapest to produce.

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