The highest-endurance aircraft currently flying is Northrop Grumman’s Global Hawk UAV, which can stay aloft for up to 40 hours. Now Darpa—which, to its credit, is never short on outlandish ideas—wants to beat that endurance record more than 1,000 times. The goal of Darpa's recently launched Vulture Program is to build a kind of atmospheric satellite that can stay aloft for five years at a time with little or no maintenance.While I tend to doubt this thing actually exists in the foreseeable future, it's certainly a nice picture. Also, I'm not sure if it's manned or a UAV, but I imagine moving crew members to and from the plane and performing maintenance will be a pain. I also don't see any advantage over a traditional satellite. In fact, as I write this, I am becoming increasingly annoyed at the mere thought of this. Why would anyone spend money on something so stupid...
No comments:
Post a Comment