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posted by janrinok on Thursday September 04 2014, @06:54PM   Printer-friendly
from the ultralight-needs-light dept.

It takes chutzpah to tweet “rockets are tricky” shortly after one you have just launched has deliberately blown itself up. But Elon Musk, founder and boss of SpaceX, is not a man who lacks self-confidence, and he did just that on August 22nd after the terminal malfunction of one of his company’s Falcon 9 vehicles. That Arianespace, a French rival of SpaceX, announced on the same day that two satellites it had tried to launch to join the European Space Agency’s Galileo constellation (intended to rival America’s Global Positioning System), had entered a “non-nominal injection orbit”—in other words, gone wrong—shows just how difficult the commercialization of space can be.

If spacecraft are so precarious, then perhaps investors should lower their sights. But not in terms of innovation; rather in altitude. Airbus, a European aerospace company, thinks that developing satellite-like capabilities without satellites is the answer. Hence the firm’s recent trial, at an undisclosed location (but one subject to Brazilian airspace regulations) of Zephyr 7, a high-altitude “pseudo-satellite”, or HAPS for short.

Zephyr (named after the Greek god of the west wind) is actually an unmanned, ultralight, solar-powered, propeller-driven aircraft. But it is designed, just as some satellites are, to hover indefinitely over the same part of the world. With a 23-metre wingspan and a weight of only 50kg, it is fragile and must remain above the ravages of the weather and the jet stream both by day and by night. It therefore flies at an altitude of around 21km (70,000 feet) during daylight hours, and then glides slowly down to around 15km when the sun is unavailable to keep it aloft.

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  • (Score: 2) by bob_super on Thursday September 04 2014, @07:15PM

    by bob_super (1357) on Thursday September 04 2014, @07:15PM (#89460)

    Once you're spent quite a few millions to throw something in space, you're pretty sure of where it is when you need it.

    The problem with the much cheaper atmospheric substitutes is all the moving parts, internal and external, and the need for maintenance, contingencies and/or redundancy.

    There's the tradeoff: for a given coverage, how many 9s of reliability can you fit in your budget?

    • (Score: 4, Interesting) by Snow on Thursday September 04 2014, @08:07PM

      by Snow (1601) on Thursday September 04 2014, @08:07PM (#89482) Journal

      It's not all bad. The vastly lower altitude will reduce latency by roughly... 500 times. Additionally, the closer proximity should lower signal power reuiqrements - thus allowing cheaper, easier, and smaller two way communication.

      Using something like this, you could sell a product like satellite internet, but without the terrible latency problems. Also, the device could probably look like a cellular modem and not require a mounted satellite dish. Something like this would allow you to deliver decent network connections to remote areas. It probabaly woudn't be cheap, but I'm sure a lot of companies would pay whatever price they ask. Satellite modems really, really suck.

      • (Score: 2) by emg on Thursday September 04 2014, @08:54PM

        by emg (3464) on Thursday September 04 2014, @08:54PM (#89502)

        You miss one rather important issue: a geosynchronous satellite can cover about a third of the planet, whereas something at 70km will cover a small fraction of that area. So you'll need a lot of these things to provide the same coverage as one single satellite; my rough back of an envelope calculation is around a couple of hundred.

        That doesn't mean they're useless, but they're not a clear win. Particularly if SpaceX continue to reduce the cost of launching new satellites.

        • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday September 04 2014, @09:46PM

          by Anonymous Coward on Thursday September 04 2014, @09:46PM (#89528)

          70 km?

          • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday September 04 2014, @10:08PM

            by Anonymous Coward on Thursday September 04 2014, @10:08PM (#89538)

            I think the 'official' definition of space is 100km (although NASA may have 'lowered' its standard to something like 90 km).

            Geosynchronous orbits are much higher. Of course velocity is also critical.

            http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/8/82/Orbitalaltitudes.jpg [wikimedia.org]

            SpaceX seems to be doing some good things (even publicity is good for space fanatics) but space is not very economically feasible yet for private individuals and companies (except for very large telcos with large user base to offset cost). It's not even really feasible for many governments, but I guess it's hard to appreciate wasting of money when you don't work for it yourself.

          • (Score: 2) by emg on Thursday September 04 2014, @11:33PM

            by emg (3464) on Thursday September 04 2014, @11:33PM (#89578)

            Sorry, I confused it with 70,000 feet. Except I actually did the calculation at 15km because it's going to have to cover the relevant area at the lowest altitude, not the highest.

        • (Score: 2) by sjames on Friday September 05 2014, @12:49PM

          by sjames (2882) on Friday September 05 2014, @12:49PM (#89798) Journal

          Given the costs of space launch and building something reliable enough to stay up there for a very long time, a couple hundred of these may well be cheaper than the one satellite. If one fails, you have a loss of 0.5% coverage rather than 100% and you can probably get a replacement up in short order.

          It also opens the way for upgrades.

          Equally helpful, no space junk orbiting forever after it dies.

          I don't really see it as either/or, each has it's advantages depending on the purpose.

    • (Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Thursday September 04 2014, @11:39PM

      by JoeMerchant (3937) on Thursday September 04 2014, @11:39PM (#89581)

      If you have two 9s of reliability with one vehicle, you'll have 4 9s of reliability by operating two vehicles simultaneously (assuming they aren't subject to near simultaneous failure modes, such as lightning strikes, solar flare events, etc.)

      How many 9s do you want? - if these things cost less than 10% of a similar capability satellite to operate over their lifetime, I think you can get all the 9s anybody is interested in.

      --
      🌻🌻 [google.com]
      • (Score: 2) by evilviper on Friday September 05 2014, @04:41AM

        by evilviper (1760) on Friday September 05 2014, @04:41AM (#89698) Homepage Journal

        If you have two 9s of reliability with one vehicle, you'll have 4 9s of reliability by operating two vehicles simultaneously

        That's a bit like saying: impregnating 9 women will give you a baby in 1 month.

        --
        Hydrogen cyanide is a delicious and necessary part of the human diet.
        • (Score: 2) by sjames on Friday September 05 2014, @12:52PM

          by sjames (2882) on Friday September 05 2014, @12:52PM (#89799) Journal

          Actually, no. It's like saying that impregnating 9 women will give you an increased chance of a live birth.

          It's simple redundancy and it has been proven for a long time.

          • (Score: 2) by evilviper on Friday September 05 2014, @01:16PM

            by evilviper (1760) on Friday September 05 2014, @01:16PM (#89804) Homepage Journal

            No, thoughtless rundancy doesn't ever work. The obstacles (eg. weather) that prevent one craft from doing it's job, will prevent both. And without seamless hand-off, you are decreasing uptime every time you swap them out.

            Just throwing more craft at the job, is like putting more redundant servers in the same rack. No matter how many you add, it still won't improve reliability.

            --
            Hydrogen cyanide is a delicious and necessary part of the human diet.
            • (Score: 2) by sjames on Friday September 05 2014, @03:05PM

              by sjames (2882) on Friday September 05 2014, @03:05PM (#89847) Journal

              Nobody said anything about thoughtless redundancy though. Yes, you have to watch out for conditions that will take all redundant parts offline at once (black swan events, for example), but that doesn't detract from the principle.

              Of course you also have to consider that if the satellite fails, it could be a months long national outage rather than a days long local outage.

              • (Score: 2) by evilviper on Saturday September 06 2014, @06:51AM

                by evilviper (1760) on Saturday September 06 2014, @06:51AM (#90117) Homepage Journal

                Nobody said anything about thoughtless redundancy though.

                Yes, that's exactly what I was responding to:

                "If you have two 9s of reliability with one vehicle, you'll have 4 9s of reliability by operating two vehicles simultaneously"

                that doesn't detract from the principle.

                Yes, it does. You have to design things from the start to be able to recognize faults, and handle fail-over. Just having extra units doesn't do any of that, and instead will increase your downtime.

                Of course you also have to consider that if the satellite fails, it could be a months long national outage rather than a days long local outage.

                A month-long outage after a decade or two of operation, is far higher availability than a day-long outage every couple months. And the more frequent outages will have people scrambling for alternatives, while the one-off outage can be more easily worked-around one time rather than ongoing day-to-day.

                --
                Hydrogen cyanide is a delicious and necessary part of the human diet.
                • (Score: 2) by sjames on Saturday September 06 2014, @10:34AM

                  by sjames (2882) on Saturday September 06 2014, @10:34AM (#90149) Journal

                  I suspect OP was simplifying. Surely you don't expect someone to spend a year designing the perfect failover system before replying! Pull the stick out!

                  In many cases, a day long outage from time to time is much more tolerable than a months long one where months will be a lot more than 1 when you have to launch a new satellite, even if you have one ready to go.

                  If you can't tolerate a day long outage, then you need to have a spare in each location ready to take off.

                  • (Score: 2) by evilviper on Saturday September 06 2014, @10:48AM

                    by evilviper (1760) on Saturday September 06 2014, @10:48AM (#90152) Homepage Journal

                    I suspect OP was simplifying.

                    You're still calling me a liar for simply responding to what the GP said.

                    Surely you don't expect someone to spend a year designing the perfect failover system before replying!

                    No, but I do expect some acknowledgment that such fail-over systems have costs (not just "Build two!"), and consideration that there might not even be practical options in some cases.

                    If you can't tolerate a day long outage, then you need to have a spare in each location ready to take off.

                    There's a big difference between a day-long outage every decade, and a day-long outage every couple weeks. The later would be completely unacceptable for TV viewers, most internet access, etc. etc. Fine for bulk data transmission, but not much else.

                    It works in the other direction, too. It's far cheaper and easier to depend on a satellite that works great for a decade, and when it goes out, have everyone aim their dish for the next satellite and keep it there for the next decade...

                    --
                    Hydrogen cyanide is a delicious and necessary part of the human diet.
        • (Score: 2) by urza9814 on Friday September 05 2014, @01:48PM

          by urza9814 (3954) on Friday September 05 2014, @01:48PM (#89816) Journal

          If you have two 9s of reliability with one vehicle, you'll have 4 9s of reliability by operating two vehicles simultaneously

          That's a bit like saying: impregnating 9 women will give you a baby in 1 month.

          No, it's more like saying impregnating two women increases the odds of having at least one child. It's RAID1. Impregnating 9 women to get a baby in 1 month would be RAID0.

          Actually, comparing this to RAID seems to work quite well. Redundant Array of Independent Drones.
          RAID0 -- two drones covering the same area, each capable of handling half the expected traffic.
          RAID1 -- two drones covering the same area, each able to handle all the traffic.
          RAID2 -- Enough drones to cover the target area, plus a few in-air backups ready to fly in and take over if one fails.

          ....and I'm not even gonna touch the rest, because even RAID2 was pretty heavily bastardized there lol

        • (Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Thursday September 18 2014, @12:57AM

          by JoeMerchant (3937) on Thursday September 18 2014, @12:57AM (#94746)

          Not really, it's more like saying: if one vehicle is operational 99 days out of 100, then what are the odds that a 2nd vehicle, also capable of operating 99 days of 100, will fail on the exact same day?

          --
          🌻🌻 [google.com]
    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday September 05 2014, @04:49PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Friday September 05 2014, @04:49PM (#89877)

      "Once you're spent quite a few millions to throw something in space, you're pretty sure of where it is when you need it."
      This could change at any moment. Anything from space-junk to near-earth asteroids to foreign military could take out a satellite.

      "The problem with the much cheaper atmospheric substitutes is all the moving parts, internal and external, and the need for maintenance, contingencies and/or redundancy."
      Not a problem at all. Since they are much cheaper, you can afford to send more up, have spares on the ground, send those spares up more quickly, and pay maintenance staff.

      I look at this and see an enormous potential for creating stable jobs and invigorating the economy.

  • (Score: 2) by frojack on Thursday September 04 2014, @07:15PM

    by frojack (1554) on Thursday September 04 2014, @07:15PM (#89461) Journal

    As the article implies, the biggest use of this would be for surveillance or mapping, as the payload capability and positioning stability isn't useful for much else. Certainly not for communications gear which is heavy and power hungry.

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  • (Score: 3, Interesting) by MrGuy on Thursday September 04 2014, @08:09PM

    by MrGuy (1007) on Thursday September 04 2014, @08:09PM (#89484)

    Why would you use heavier-than-air technology for this when lighter-than-air technology is available? Seems like a mini-blimp with solar-powered thrusters would have more cargo-carrying capacity (y'know, if you wanted to do something useful with your pseudo-satelites) and less chance of total loss (dirigibles don't crash even if the engine gives out), all while using existing, known, relatively cheap technology.

    Don't get me wrong - a heavier-than-air craft that can fly indefinitely is an impressive feat of engineering. Just not one that's necessary to solve the purported issue.

    • (Score: 1) by richtopia on Thursday September 04 2014, @08:18PM

      by richtopia (3160) on Thursday September 04 2014, @08:18PM (#89489) Homepage Journal

      Positioning comes to mind. The wind at these altitudes is pretty strong, and it looks like the idea of this craft is to fly into the wind to remain relatively geosynchronous.

      However I do believe that balloons for similar applications have been considered. Is it Google who wants to bring internet to the world via balloons? Or maybe Facebook.

      • (Score: 2) by frojack on Thursday September 04 2014, @11:47PM

        by frojack (1554) on Thursday September 04 2014, @11:47PM (#89585) Journal

        Balloons have tethers. Always a risk for aircraft.

        --
        No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.
        • (Score: 2) by MrGuy on Friday September 05 2014, @02:05AM

          by MrGuy (1007) on Friday September 05 2014, @02:05AM (#89647)

          Dirigibles, however, do not.

  • (Score: 3, Interesting) by gman003 on Thursday September 04 2014, @08:17PM

    by gman003 (4155) on Thursday September 04 2014, @08:17PM (#89488)

    Why all the complexity of a solar-powered, prop-driven aircraft? Hovering in one spot is pretty much perfect for a balloon-type craft. You'd probably need a dirigible, since you need some way to compensate for winds, but you'd need far weaker engines (leaving more power for your payload) and have a much more graceful failure mode (blowing away instead of gliding to a crash). And since it's unmanned, you can use cheap-as-dirt hydrogen instead of pricey helium as your lift gas.

    Altitude shouldn't be a problem - weather balloons can reach 40km, twice what this plane is supposed to do. And it won't have the varying altitude, which I suspect will cause them some engineering headaches. Overall, it seems like a simpler, more robust design.

    • (Score: 2) by HiThere on Thursday September 04 2014, @11:08PM

      by HiThere (866) Subscriber Badge on Thursday September 04 2014, @11:08PM (#89565) Journal

      You would definitely need a dirigible if you wanted station-keeping in a lighter than air craft. And altitude WOULD be a problem, as buoyancy changes with temperature. Doesn't mean it's not soluble, but it does need to be addressed. As for Hydrogen...the problem is it tends to leak. Still, perhaps some of the metalized plastics are secure against leaks. (It's not THAT dangerous, but confining it *is* a problem.) And ideally you'd want some sort of battery that would deliver enough power to allow for station-keeping during the night.

      All-in-all, it should be doable. But it wouldn't be as easy as you are indicating.

      --
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      • (Score: 2) by Hairyfeet on Friday September 05 2014, @01:44AM

        by Hairyfeet (75) <{bassbeast1968} {at} {gmail.com}> on Friday September 05 2014, @01:44AM (#89638) Journal

        Surely the modern materials would solve the leak problem, and as the other pointed out hydrogen is insanely cheap so even if you had minor leakage the cost to replace the gas, hell even keeping a second one ready so you can swap them out when the gas levels reach a certain percentage, should be very doable. As for power a combination of solar and battery should be VERY doable in a dirigible and the motors would likewise be able to be smaller and weaker than a heavier than air so...yeah gotta agree with the other guy, making this a plane really doesn't make much sense....well unless they are strictly trying to grab some of that sweet DoD money,after all they are big on drone plans and don't seem to like the idea of dirigibles, so that may be the reason.

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        • (Score: 3, Interesting) by evilviper on Friday September 05 2014, @04:35AM

          by evilviper (1760) on Friday September 05 2014, @04:35AM (#89695) Homepage Journal

          Surely the modern materials would solve the leak problem,

          Hah! Do let me know when you come up with a lightweight material with pores smaller than a HYDROGEN ATOM. You really won't do much better than the aluminum coating the Hindenburg had. Note that aluminum makes superb rocket-fuel...

          Now... if you want cheap gas without so much leakage, methane/natural gas would probably be better.

          the cost to replace the gas [...] should be very doable.

          But HOW? A balloon in the stratosphere isn't going to be the easiest place to get supplies to. Helicopters don't get that high, any aircraft are going to be going mach 0.5, which doesn't leave much time to hand-off supplies.

          You'll at least need to maintain a second fleet of manned resupply dirigibles, making frequent trips, with all the safety risks those have. And it'll be non-trivial sorting out the two-giants-in-the-sky rendezvous and resupply systems... Transferring hydrogen in the stratosphere isn't going to be nearly so easy as the (really not easy) mid-air refueling of jets.

          even keeping a second one ready so you can swap them out

          I'm not so sure that maintaining multiple dirigibles for every location, that you have to swap out every couple weeks, is going to be practical. The (vastly lighter-weight) weather balloon endurance record is 42 days.

          "the total cost of launching [weather] balloons is about $1 million — compared with several tens of millions of dollars for a satellite". That's great for one-off R&D projects, but if you're doubling that every couple weeks to maintain sustained communications for years, satellites would quickly become the cheaper option.

          Not that I think balloons are a bad idea... But you have to admit that solar aircraft have some real potential advantages, even despite the necessity of changing altitude daily.

          As for power a combination of solar and battery should be VERY doable in a dirigible

          I just love the image of fleets of hydrogen blimps equipped with huge Li-Ion batteries flying all over our skies... What could POSSIBLY go wrong?

          well unless they are strictly trying to grab some of that sweet DoD money

          The US DoD isn't too big on buying stuff from (French / European) Airbus.

          --
          Hydrogen cyanide is a delicious and necessary part of the human diet.
    • (Score: 3, Interesting) by Phoenix666 on Friday September 05 2014, @01:22AM

      by Phoenix666 (552) on Friday September 05 2014, @01:22AM (#89619) Journal

      I've often wondered why a person (person of means, of course), couldn't scale up your basic idea to a sky yacht that never needs to land, unless you want it to. Cover the envelope with solar, pop out mini wind turbines, deploy kite wind turbines, and you've got all the power you need. If you leak some hydrogen, so what? Electrolyze yourself some more. Employ an aquaponics setup for all your sustenance needs. Distill water from the atmosphere. Land a runabout on top if you feel like an excursion to terra firma. Skirt weather if and when you need to. Enjoy the endless beauty and variability of the clouds, sunsets, sunrises, and dramatic full moons that most of us only get to glimpse past our snoring seatmates and through the tiny triangle of view we get over the wing of a 747.

      Other people talk about sea-steading, but me, if I had the money, I'd take up sky-steading and never look back.

      --
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  • (Score: 2) by wonkey_monkey on Thursday September 04 2014, @09:35PM

    by wonkey_monkey (279) on Thursday September 04 2014, @09:35PM (#89523) Homepage

    It takes chutzpah to tweet “rockets are tricky” shortly after one you have just launched has deliberately blown itself up. But Elon Musk, founder and boss of SpaceX, is...

    ...the boss, so he can say what he likes.

    --
    systemd is Roko's Basilisk