On Tue, 2004-05-25 at 21:51, Steve Withers wrote:
On Wed, 2004-05-26 at 21:14, Tikiri Wickramasingha wrote:
NASA Helios - remotely piloted, solar powered, extreme high altitude aircraft capable of carying a payload simillar to a small satelite. Uses Fuel Cells to store power generated by solar panels. It is designed to stay in the air forever. Wing Span approximately the size of a B-52 Bomber. Cost if I rememebr right was a couple million dollars. But that is a fraction of what running fibre all the way down SH1 would cost.
No doubt it is patented.....
In essense it's just a big airframe with solar panels, hydrogen based fuel cells, and a whole heap of fancy electronics. Pretty hard to patent considering that a number of simillarly powered aircraft are being commercialized (includes boeing). I'm not saying it's easy though... http://www.google.co.nz/search?hl=en&ie=UTF-8&q=%22fuel+cell%22+aircraft&btnG=Search&meta=
I was interested to see - when working on a homework project with my daughter - that the Wright Brothers had a patent on their wing design....which truly was a unique innovation created by them -and that Americans especially took no notice of it and copied it shamelessly - paying no royalties.
So all we need to do is take the Helios idea and design our own.
...Now where did I leave that wind tunnel?
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