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Flying on solar power isn’t easy, but the U.S.-based startup Skydweller Aero thinks they may have a winning design.
Called the Skydweller, this autonomous drone sports a 236-foot wingspan laden with 17,000 individual solar cells, and is capable of flying for at least three months without stopping, thanks to its quadruple redundant flight software and 1,400 pounds of batteries on board.
This isn’t a play at cross-country sustainable flight—Skydweller Vero sees their aircraft as primarily a spy tool for loitering over conflict zones or other areas of interest.
Decarbonizing various forms of human transportation has been a relatively straightforward process. Lithium-ion batteries packed inside electric cars deliver mileage per charge similar to gasoline-powered cars, and electric trains have been around for nearly 150 years. Flying, on the other hand, has been a bit more difficult. Turns out you need a lot of energy to keep things running in mid-air, and that can be quite the engineering challenge.
It’s a difficulty that’s been thoroughly explored by solar-powered electric planes like Solar Impulse, which completed a piloted round-the-world flight back in 2016. And now, a new kind of a solar plane—called the Skydweller—is following in its footsteps.
Although more of a drone than a plane (since it’s designed to be autonomous), the Skydweller—built by the U.S. tech startup Skydweller Aero—contains 17,000 individual solar cells placed across its gargantuan 236-foot wingspan, which is wider than a Boeing 747 tip-to-tip. Of course, seeing as it has no human cargo, it’s also 160 times lighter (thanks to its carbon fiber construction), and can carry only 2.5 metric tons at max capacity.
In April 2024, Skydweller successful performed its first unmanned test flight at Stennis International Airport in Mississippi.
“This is a true, world-changing first in the aerospace industry,” Skydweller Aero CEO Robert Miller said in a press statement at the time. “We are applying cutting-edge, 21st-century materials science, artificial intelligence, and software development to an industry that has spent more than 100 years building piloted, combustion-based aircraft.”
While it sounds a bit like the main character from some schlocky Star Wars ripoff, the name is an apt one, as Skydweller isn’t designed with human passengers in mind. Instead, Skydweller Aero sees its aircraft primarily as a surveillance machine, circling the sky and providing much-needed eyes over conflict zones or other areas of interest. Powered by the Sun, the company estimates that it can stay airborne for at least three months at a time—if not longer. To survive those long nights when the Sun isn’t shining, the aircraft is equipped with 1,400 pounds of batteries, and it also drops to lower elevations, descending from its typical operating range of between 25,000 and 35,000 feet down to between 5,000 and 10,000 feet.
Of course, power is only part of the issue—the Skydweller’s aviation software also has to continuously run without error. According to Skydweller’s website, the aircraft’s vehicle management system maintains quadruple redundancy by using “advanced self-healing algorithms within the VMS” to autonomously shut down, fix, and resurrect while the drone is in flight.
The U.S. military has invested in a variety of surveillance balloons and blimps in the recent past. The Joint Land Attack Cruise Missile Defense Elevated Netted Sensor System (JLENS), first requested in the late 90s, was meant to fulfill a similar role, but was effectively cancelled in 2017. Recently, the U.S. Army has worked with the private company Aerostar to develop spy balloons capable of staying aloft for a month (and were last seen not over a warzone, but instead the city of Tucszon, Arizona near the U.S.-Mexico border).
No doubt the Skydweller would add another tool to that surveillance arsenal. Whether that’s a good or bad thing remains to be seen.
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