[ad_1]
Facebook announced that he would no longer pursue his dream of building a gigantic solar powered aircraft to blow up the internet to underserved laser communities. Surprisingly, this is just not practical.
In an article on the company's coding sub-site, Yael Maguire of Facebook announced that "we have decided to no longer design or build our own aircraft and close our facilities at Bridgewater." 16 jobs specific to the development and maintenance of the aircraft, confirmed the company at TechCrunch, although many other aspects of the project were not affected.
The company will continue its work with partners, such as Airbus, to advance the "High Altitude Platform Stations" (HAPS) such as Aquila.
The program is ongoing since 2014 (the acquisition of Ascenta seems to be its real beginning) and public since 2015, and had its first test flight in 2016 – resulting in a "structural failure", a hard landing and a subsequent investigation by the NTSB. The second test flight was better, but far from perfect.
The craft itself, a huge flying V that was left in the air at an extremely low power pulled by solar cells, seems to have worked very well, in fact, despite some snags. But Facebook is not the only company looking to get into high-powered, low-altitude communications gear.
"By working on these efforts, we were excited to see leading aerospace companies start investing in this technology, including the design and construction of new high-altitude aircraft," writes Maguire. .
Given the sheer scale of the investments required to build such a machine from scratch and the huge lack of expertise and core competencies between a social network and an experienced aerospace company, it is not necessary to Is not surprising that Facebook has decided to reduce its losses.
The decision was preceded by a report from Business Insider that the project had more or less stalled: its chief and chief engineer left last month after reading between the lines, the efforts to double the project with a redesign and a private shed. rejected.
L & # 39; Aquila plan, as other ambitious connectivity ideas, some of which are still under study, was conceived in a period that one could call "Facebook pic", while it was at the peak of its growth, before reaching the current level of criticism. when his goals were high in many ways.
There is no doubt that the company plans to pursue "the next billion" in a way that is not so expensive or unprecedented. Maguire indicates that the work will continue, but not so directly:
In the future, we will continue to work with partners such as Airbus on HAPS connectivity in general, and other technologies needed to operate this system, such as flight control computers and high-density batteries. On the policy side, we will be working on a proposal for the 2019 World Radiocommunication Conference to get more spectrum for HAPS stations, and we will actively participate in a number of advisory boards and regulatory committees in the US and abroad.
It is difficult to criticize Facebook for its ambition, even though at the time there were many who opposed this extremely techno-utopian idea of how the Internet could be delivered to isolated communities. They have surely said, and will continue to say, that money would be better spent for fiber laying or basic infrastructure establishment. We will see.
I asked Facebook to provide me with more information, for example on the projects specifically supported by the project and on what would happen to the IP and the material included in the program Aquila.
Although a Facebook representative refused to answer my specific questions, he insisted that the Aquila project was both successful and far-reaching; although a real aircraft is no longer part of it (this is the duty of the real aerospace companies), there has been a lot of other advances in the field of transmission, propulsion, and so on. , which are still very much in development. What does the company expect to do exactly with those This is still unclear, but we can probably expect news on this front over the next few months as the program adjusts.
Source link
