Flying Solar

use all this fuel and all that. Why don't they just make solar powered rockets. That's a great question. It's not sure it is. Think of it this way. The Sun. The Sun is a very powerful object, right, and there's even more of it in space and and and the energy that we're using on Earth, most of it, in some form or another, we owe to the Sun. If you trace it back far right, that's true. Well, yeah, it's almost all solar I guess maybe not like geo thermal.

But if you're talking about wind power, well that's driven by pressure differentials that are caused by the Sun heating the crust of the Earth. Uh. If you're doing solar power, of course that's solar. If your coal is technically plants and animals that have been compressed over a long period of time, and where that's part of the light cycle,

it's yeah, they made their energy from solar exactly. Light cycles just make me think of tron Even hydroelectric, you could say, is solar because the sun heats the oceans, which causes the water vapor to rise up and then travels up, rains down, and then the rain coming down from the upper elevations is what powers those turbines at the hydroelectric plants. Yeah. So I don't see why your question is so silly unless you're talking about using solar panels. Yeah.

Well the officially problem. I don't think you could power a rocket with electricity in any case probably no, No, that will not be do not really work? No, Okay, So what we're really getting at here is that solar power there are some problems with efficiency, which we've talked about before. Solar panels have an efficiency that for the

consumer market tends to top out right around something like that. Uh. There are some prototypes and some that are used for very high level uh like space application stuff that keeps you know, satellites power that kind of thing that can reach somewhere in the realm of in lab conditions. But those are under ideal circumstances. And so we're talking about not even being able to capture all the energy that

comes in through the sun. So the sun hits these panels, the panels are only able to capitalize on twenty of the energy that's hitting it. And then on top of that, you have to worry about when the sun is not shining, it doesn't translate into that much electricity. It's uh, it's one of those things where you might say, hey, what's the point and even trying to make a solar powered vehicle, but that hasn't stopped people from making solar powered vehicles.

No kidding, solar powered vehicles. Let's talk about those today. Okay, that sounds good. I was I was ready to talk about the Age of Aquarius. But we can switch gears. So, yeah, it's solar power, renewable energy source. Right, you don't have to worry about running out of it. Uh. If if we run out of solar power, we have bigger problems. We've we've sort of run out of life. Yeah, it's also probably about four billion years in the future. Yeah, so we've got some time. I mean, you know, don't

like plan ahead too far. You know, we've got to have some flexibility here. But then it's also it's clean energy. At least the actual energy you get is clean. Right. The way we have to create stuff to capture that energy may or may not be clean. We'll talk about that in a second. But the you don't have to worry about you're not creating um greenhouse gas emissions by using this. It's just clean electricity. So there are reasons people have been really interested in using solar panels and

solar power to make vehicles go. You also don't have to stop somewhere specific and refill it basically anywhere the sun is shining. I mean, there's a reason you would put solar panels on say a Mars rover that it's it's continuously replenishable as long as you're basically outdoors in a place where you can get sun. Right. You don't have to go to Mars and pre build gas stations

there right right, So that's you know, a huge advantage. Uh. And these are these are really important things that people have looked into. Two while designing you know, some some really cool vehicles in various ways, not just we're gonna be talking about lots of different types. We're gonna talk about some cars, boats, and even some some planes, some aircraft that use solar power to generate the thrust they need to fly, which is pretty phenomenal when you think

about it. I don't believe you, except I do because we've talked about it a little bit before. But did I not. Were I not to know about it already,

I wouldn't leave you. Yeah, yeah, because again we're thinking about the fact that solar a single solar cell is not generating that much electricity, and you think about the amount of power you need to have an electric motor capable of, say turning a propell or fast enough to generate thrust or to propel a car forward so that it can race along, uh the Australian Outback, because we'll be talking about that too. Um, it's pretty phenomenal stuff.

It does mean that people have had to make some big advances in everything from solar panel technology to battery technology to just engineering the design of aircraft and h and other vehicles. So let's talk about some of the reasons before we do that. Let's tell us some of the reasons that are kind of the downside of solar power. So, for one, we we kind of mentioned, you know, you kind of have to have sunlight. If you don't have sunlight,

then you're not getting power. Right. It's more useful perhaps in some regions than in other regions. And you need to work out that entire thing where if the sun isn't shining and you still want to drive your car or boat or etcetera, then you have to you have to have some sort of energy storage device or else you don't go. You've got the problem that it just simply isn't as powerful as say an internal combustion engine or like a really big battery stored up with energy

from the socket. Right, even if you did have a battery and you were using the solar power to charge the battery, in general, you're not. It's hard to generate the same kind of torque that you would get from an internal combustion engine. You might be able to go really fast, because I mean, the Tesla Roadster goes really fast and it's an electric car. You could in theory

charge that electric vehicle using solar power. You would just not need to drive that car for a while to be able to get enough electricity to to charge it to a decent amount. Yeah, there's not enough continuous turnover of power from the panels themselves to power that kind of strength. Actually, you're you're relying specifically on the energy stored within the battery, and then you would have to

use the solar power to to regenerate that energy. But also solar panels rely on what we call rare earth elements, stuff that appears in trace amounts in certain parts of the world, and usually it's it's combined with other stuff. So you have to do some pretty um, pretty extreme measures to separate the stuff you need from the stuff you don't want, like dipping it into acid baths, so it melts away all the stuff you don't want and you're left with the rare earth elements that are really

important for creating things like solar panels. These are also important for things like wind turbines. This is the ugly side of renewable energy, where the production of the stuff we use to make those things clean technologies is kind of dirty. Yeah, especially if you're not taking extra care

during the production cycle. So you may have heard that a lot of the rare earth elements are being produced out of China, and China has something somewhere depending upon whom you ask, somewhere between twenty three and thirty seven percent of the world's supply of rare earth elements in

this country, which is which is a good amount. But the reason that we get most of that stuff from China is because China produces it very cheaply, mostly because they don't care about their workers or the environment, although that is they're saying that they're changing that, but this is where it's going to get really kind of difficult

and political. So China, while it has maybe somewhere around a quarter to maybe a third of the world's supply of these rare earth elements, is actually supplying closer to of all of the ones that are being used today. So I mean, that's a it's enormous. And the reason for that, like you said, Lauren, is because they're cheaper coming out of China than they are in other places in the world. One of the reasons is that China has created these huge lakes of pollutants, really uh from

the mining process. So when they're separating out those rare earth elements from everything else you get these very toxic pools that are forming and can cause some really serious health hazards in the populations around that. And uh, recently, like within the last few years, China has been cutting back on the number of rare earth elements that allows,

like the amount that it allows to export from China. Now, the official explanation for that is that they want to put in more controls to be environmentally conscious, which that's noble. We want to see and environmentally conscious approach. And I was being a little bit cheeky. I don't think that China totally doesn't care about its people are its environment. I just think that for for for a while, it has been less of a concern than perhaps it should

have been. Yeah, these are all most not all, I will say, most of the minds are state run and uh it doesn't look it looks like most of the money is going to the state and not to the miners.

And on top of that, uh, we also have critics who say perhaps the official explanation isn't entirely true, that that perhaps one of the reasons why China has been cutting back on the exportation of rare earth elements is really so that it can entice more companies to come over to China because if it's not you know, if the companies come over and build production facilities, then the

rare earth elements don't have to be exported. They stay within China until they're in the finished product, which then gets shipped out. So there's been a lot of political maneuvers on both sides, and I don't know that anyone is completely you know, all the cards are on the table on this issue. So it's complicated and it's messy. And so we were starting to see some rare earth elements start to get a little less expensive to produce in other places, so it may turn out that that, uh,

it gets balanced in some other way. Um, we have seen people stop demanding their electronics, so we still kind

of need these things. And it is one of those little black marks against not a little black market, is a black mark against renewable energy, just because we have to have these these components to make the stuff to get that renewable energy, that that clean electricity that we want, right and when that clean electricity is also causing you know, like sulfuric acid vapor in the local air and radioactive thorium in the water. Yes, we we should all be

concerned about that. Now that all being said, you know, these are things that we can address. These are things that we can look to and and make changes and make sure that we're getting these rare earth elements in a responsible way that isn't environmentally damaging or or hurting populations. We can do that. That's completely something that's within our control, once the people who are in charge of it decide

that's something to do. So I'm optimistic that we're going to get past this current state of affairs and move toward a more responsible way of producing these rare earth elements. So that part, even though it's currently a negative, I think will eventually, given the right the right motivation, go away. So that's that's one negative that we can say, all right, this is something we can fix, right, this is something

we can take care of. There are other ones that we can't, like the whole idea when the sun is not out, you're not generating electricity. We can't really fix that. You know, it's not like unless we are actually putting solar panels outside the stratosphere, but then we're not really using it for vehicles anymore. So unless you're beaming it

to the vehicles. More non existent technology, you can be beaming it to the power grid and then the vehicles plug into the power grid and the electric vehicles take you where you need to go. Well, yeah, it's all so. There's also the idea of power density on these solar vehicles, the idea of you need to have enough panels there to generate the electricity you need to do whatever it is those those panels are meant to do. So let's

say we've got a pure solar powered car. There's no real battery that like, if there's there's maybe a battery there to run some auxiliary systems, but the main drive here is just from solar power. You would have to have lots of panels coding the exterior of this car, and it might not look too car like. Yeah, well you need to think about there are some really kind of basic practical limitations you have when you're designing a car.

One of the things is you can't give it like a five hundred meter square flat area on the top. You know, it needs to fit in a lane and drive on the road, assuming that you're ever going to make this street legal. Yet, a lot of a lot of the cars we're going to talk about are not necessarily street legal. It's more a kind of a concept car in a way. They work, but they're not meant to be, you know, driving there right next to other vehicles. Right.

But then also you have those same concerns cutting into things that are going to matter for any car that needs to go, like weight and aerodynamic stability. If you've got huge flat surfaces on the car that are supposed to be facing the sun at all times for you know, the maximum absorption of the solar energy, that's probably going to cut into your car's aerodynamic design. Yeah, usually you see these kind of almost wing like vehicles. There are some that are more curvy and they look kind of

like airplanes on the ground. There are a lot that look like that, particularly the ones that are meant for racing. You also start having to worry about heat sync. I mean, because the purpose of these things is too is to draw in heat energy from the sun, and if you're using that to carry something that people are are sitting in,

it gets a little toasting. It can get toasting. I would imagine also if you were trying to make this available to the consumer and attractive in a commercial marketplace, safety might be a concern because if you're you're trying to design a car that would be powered by solar panels, it needs to be very very light. And when you design a car that's that light, people start having concerns about how does it stand up on impact well, and and to be fair, I mean you might as well

go ahead and get this out of the way. Solar powered vehicles are not going to be something that's in the consumer realm. That's it's not meant to be in the consumer realm. But they have an important place and we'll discuss that, but certainly not any time in the very near future. Yeah, I can't. I mean, they might play a role like you might have a Toyota has priuses that have solar panels that allow you to help power some of the auxiliary systems not necessary and help

recharge the battery as well. It also powers a little fan to help ventilate. Yeah, so it doesn't so you don't end up with a car that's a million degrees when you try and get inside, which in Atlanta, trust me, it happens. So Um, you know, there aren't consumer or versions out there, but it's not meant as like a fully solar powered vehicle that that I don't think we're going to see just because of the limitations we've talked about.

But it doesn't mean that it's not important and that it won't help in the long run, for it has a concept out. But I'll talk about that a little bit later on down the line. So let's let's go on to some of these solar vehicles. I mean, they all One other drawback I guess I should say is that solar panels are expensive. And so these these vehicles that we've been looking at, most of them are in

this sort of concept prototype phase. They're meant to be a proof of concept, not something that's going to hit the consumer market. And so they also tend to be incredibly expensive because they're they're using some cutting edge technology and and customized engineering for them to work. So first we're gonna talk about some solar cars. So, like we said, these tend to be made out of very lightweight materials

like fiberglass. Uh, pretty much anything that isn't necessary to who make the car go is not going to be on that car. Right. The kind of testing, racing concept sort of things are usually single passenger vehicles. Yeah, there's one challenge that I read about where it's for to two person vehicles. But for the most part there are and that was meant to show us a practicality, like the idea of how practical can you make a solar vehicle?

But for for the lighter your people. When you have to ask someone like what do you have for lunch today? Because I don't know if we can make it to work or not. That's that's that's rough. But um these have been around for a few decades though. Back in the late seventies and early eighties, a few private citizens began building their own experimental vehicles. I mean, I mean single issue clearly never meant for the market or anything

like that or even for this kind of experimental run. UM. And then on the commercial end, like we were kind of saying a minute ago, there there are some concessions

to solar energy that are on the market. Indeed, UM UH Toyota has has those those optional panels on its Prius, Mazda has a couple of things Cadillacs Provocation Nissan's Leaf both use UM panels to power its cabin electronics and UH and and then like I was saying at four debut a concept car with a UM kind of lens, like like a lens canopy on top of it that says could enable the vehicle to fully charge its batteries on a single day of sunlight. Um, that's pretty incredible.

And I mean, I mean the car itself currently runs something like thirty three thirty five thousand dollars and they have not put a price tag on this crazy lens idea there's yet. But I sit there, I think about, like, I've got a backpack sitting in the office right now that has a cellar panel on it, and it has a battery pack inside it, and it's meant to help

you charge your your portable electronics when you're out and about. Right. Uh, If I want to charge that battery pack, which can give me maybe ARGE on a phone, uh, it takes twelve hours of constant exposure to sunlight for me to get that that battery pack recharged. Your backpack may not be cutting edge, no, I know, I know, but I'm

saying that it is incredible to me. Therefore, that a car would be able to potentially recharge its entire battery within the course of a single day in sunlight that is such a huge leap, it's totally understand Yes, So then I wanted to talk about the World Solar Challenge. So it's a quote unquote friendly competition between engineering teams. Yeah, I'm sure there's a lot like those solar challenges where

people show up with knives and broken bottles. I'm sure some trash talking though that goes on and these things, although maybe people don't necessarily understand each other because the

teams do come from all over the world. They meet in Australia and the two thousand thirteen course was a three thousand kilometer course that's about one eight hundred sixty four miles and it stretched from r When, Australia to Adelaide, and the cars were allowed to store only five kilowatt hours of energy, which is about ten percent of all the energy needed to move the car. Now, when you say store, does that mean they were only able to arrive with that much in their batteries or could only

store that much total? That that's all they could store total in the caacity. Yeah, the battery capacity, who's only five hours? Because anything beyond that was considered to be cheating, like you had to have the main part of your power needed to come from direct solar energy, although you could also recapture any kinetic energy like you know, have regenerative breaking, that kind of stuff. You could use that to help recharge the battery or or otherwise, you know,

use kinetic energy to help your car go. And UH. They they had several different types of challenges. There was the the Challenger class, the Cruiser class, and the Adventure class. UH. The Challenger class was my was the one that was my favorite. It was it involved the teams getting out, getting into their cars and then driving from uh, you know, from Darwin to Adelaide and every day at five pm

they had to stop. They were required by the rules to stop at five pm wherever they were and camp out overnight and then the next day, uh they would be allowed to continue the race. So it was one where you know, you couldn't just rely on your battery to get you a little extra You had to stop when everybody else did. And it that to me, it was pretty phenomenal. The the the winner was a team from the Netherlands, the Solar Car Team, the new On

Solar Car Team. They made the trip in thirty three hours, three minutes their average speed was ninety point seven one kilometers per hour or fifty six miles per hour. So these are not these are race cars for solar races, but they're not necessarily hitting blinding speeds. Although I should also add that at least when they first did this race, one of the limitations was the hundred and ten kilometer per hour speed him that Australia had and they couldn't.

The teams were like, we we could make something that's faster than that, but we're not allowed to. So but yeah, I should also say, you know that was average speed was fifty six miles per hour, so top speed was different from that. It's actually not bad at all. I mean, I mean for first solar powered car. Yeah, I would have thought, yeah, yeah, when you sit there and you think fifty six miles per hour and you never have to stop to refuel, but you do have to stop

when the sun essentially goes down. Um, it's not too bad. The United States, they had a team from Stanford the Solar Car Project that came in fourth place. There were several other teams from Japan, Australia, the Netherlands, another one from the United States as well. The University of Michigan had a car in this race. Very interesting stuff. They the other classes were not really focused on speed primarily.

The Cruiser class was really on the practicality. This was the one where you had a driver and passenger as part of the package, like you had to have of two people being transported in these cars, and they were given scores based upon not just the speed, but the energy efficiency and the actual practicality of it as a vehicle.

So there's some subjectivity to that score because there's like a panel of judges who had decided what was practical versus not practical, And I don't know what their criteria were for that, but I thought that was interesting. And then they had the Adventure class, which was a a race that allowed former competitors people or or research teams that had put in a car in previous races UH to man a brand new team of drivers and operators UH and then go through the race just for fun.

They had already they had already participated once, so this was not like they weren't eligible for the Challenger Crew class race. But if they wanted to re erase a car they had already fielded once, perhaps they made improvements. Some of these cars don't make it all the way through and end up the trailer. Their cars, they have to put them in the back of a trailer. So there could be some matter of pride for some teams who say we've made some improvements and this time we're

going to make the whole thing. They would go in the Adventure class. So that's kind of neat and it's BIENNI also the next one will be There are a few other races like this around the world. There's one in the US and Canada called appropriately the American Solar Challenge, and one in South America called the Atacomma Solar Challenge

because it takes place in the Atacama Desert. Um. There's also a Formula Son uh Formula Son Grand Prix Track Eventum, which is more focused on that speed and handling kind of stuff. And uh, can I tell you guys, I didn't want to write it in the notes because I felt like you, Jonathan especially would very much appreciate this hit. Can Can you imagine what this type of thing is called. It's called solar racing, ray racing. Nice. Nice, that's one

of those that works better in print. Excellent. It Uh. There are also busses that rely on solar power, which you might that might surprise you because you're thinking, all right, these these cars we're talking about, these concept cars are made out of the super lightweight material. They can hold maybe one or two people. They can't go very fast. How would you make that into a bus? Yeah. When I think bus, I do not think aerodynamic, nor do

I think lightweight. Yeah, and in this case, you'd be correct. These are not these weird vehicles that couldn't withstand and impact or you know, they're not. They're essentially electric buses. But you do have lots of surface area on a bus, so that's a that's a plus. And some of them do have solar panels, although, like you point out, Lauren, one of the things you have to consider, there's the heat problem. Some of them don't have any solar panels

on them at all. They are just an electric vehicle. But they're called solar buses because they're getting their electricity from refueling stations. These these you know, quote unquote refueling stations that are really solar panel farms. They're stationary units that have solar panels that are geared to point towards the sun and then they just get the electricity from those places. Okay, now that that's not cool. I mean that is cool, but that's not really sort of what

we're talking about. It's not a vehicle that uses sunlight to directly translate into motion. Yeah, this was this is kind of an intermediary step, but it's really making sure that the electricity you get is from a clean source as opposed to some greenhouse gas emitting type of of of fuel sources. Right, I'm not knocking it. I'm just talking about how it's not necessarily a solar vehicle better than any solar powered bus as I have built this week. Yeah.

So next we have boats. So, yeah, there are boats that use solar power. Most of them tend to be used for rivers and canals. They're not most of them are, you know, using these these relatively calm waterways, because again, you're not generating a lot of power. You have to have a lot of surface area to generate enough power to move anything that's of a significant size. So for some reason, the boat seems more reasonable as a solar

powered vehicle to me that a car does. Maybe it's just because people aren't really used to boats going all that fast. Well, it all depend yeah, I mean if you know, obviously never been on a cigarette speedboat, but uh yeah, there's some that that go really fast, but not these and a lot of them are also hybrids in that they're using sales as well, so you get wind power and solar power, so still getting lots of of renewable energy that's not emitting any greenhouse gases in

the in the mix. But there are some concept boats actually they've been built, they're beyond concepts, uh, that can traverse oceans. The first one that I could find was called Sun twenty one and is a fourteen meter or forty six ft long catamaran and in two thousand seven it's sailed from Seville, Spain to Miami, Florida, and then it's sailed from Miami to New York. So that's pretty impressive for a solar powered vehicle. And then you have

the and I'm gonna I apologize ahead of time. I'm going to end up mispronouncing this name because uh, there are all sorts of oomlouts and stuff in this that I don't know how to pronounce. But the Turinure Planet Solar is also another solar powered catamaran yacht. That one's thirty meters long, which is ninety eight feet, and it's fifteen point two meters wide, so it's fifty feet wide. This thing looks like kind of the boat version of those solar cars. There's no sail, it's just a big

flat solar panel. If you were on the water level and looking at this thing, you would see this incredible catamaran yacht thing. It looks amazing and it looks like it has like a wing span that stretches out over it. From above you just see like this big flat solar panel that's vaguely boat shaped. UM. But yeah, it only used solar power to to uh, to propel itself, so that was pretty phenomenal. UM. And it did a full

circumnavigation of the globe in two thousand twelve. This makes me wonder, and I don't know answer, what is the most efficient way to propel a craft through water? I mean, is it? Is it propellers or is it jets or skip I get someone big enough to give a good

flick of the wrist. See, Actually, the most efficient way of propelling through water, I would say you would have to limit your surface area contact with the water, So a catamaran something that has those almost like skis, So you're you're limiting as much of the craft as possible in contact with the water to reduce drag, and then you have to have some form of thrust to make you go forward. So the thrust the frust part would

I mean really doesn't matter. I guess you could put a jet on one and if you really wanted to. But I think that we're going somewhere with this giant powered vehicle motion. I think I think we just build a gigantic right arm complete with wrist and hand. Someone someone get Terry gilliam on this, put the craft in it, yeah, and then just just do skip it right across the Atlantic. Yeah. So solar boats, this is this is one of those applications where, because of the nature of travel, you can

understand it being a viable option. This could be something that you could see in consumer boats. Enough. When I say consumer boats, I'm talking about people who make more money than I do, who can afford a boat and maintain a boat, etcetera, etcetera. But it would allow you to do things like maybe power all the electronics on board the boat. Um, and whether or not it was using a motor or sales or a combination. You know

that that would be something else. Solar also seems perhaps well suited to boats, just because of the idea that well, you're out on the water, that might be one problem with the car. So you want to have your car collecting solar energy while it's dormant, while you're not driving it. Well, a lot of people park in a parking garage or under a carboard, or in a garage, or under trees, just places where there's not going to be a lot

of sunlight. There are trees on the surface of water, yeah, exactly. If you're out on the open water, you've got full sunlight, there's yeah, yeah exactly. So definitely one of the the ways we would easily imagine solar power being put to use. One that might not be so easy to imagine is a solar powered airplane, which is it is just amazing

to me that such a thing exists. It is because you think about everything you need to make an aircraft fly, and you think about the amount of power that your typical commercial and military aircraft possess, and it's it's a huge amount of power. I mean it's enormous. It's it's mind boggling, really and to sit there and think, hey, could we make something that is able to generate enough power just from the electricity these solar panels are gathering

to make a vehicle fly. I think a few years ago you would have had engineers just say this is not this isn't possible. But over the last several years, engineers have done the impossible. They've managed to make these.

Now in some cases we're talking about unmanned vehicles, they're not all piloted by people, and in fact, unmanned aerial vehicles I think is one of the the areas where we'll see this this kind of technology be put to greater use, not just in proof of concept or engineering challenges, but in actual uh U a V s. I think it's probably gonna go to percolate really well over the next few years in U A v's just because it is such a weight issue of bringing fuel up on

something that you want to be buzzing around for a

good minute. Well, yeah, if you want to use something for reconnaissance, then you what the what you don't want to hear is just as you are getting an idea of whatever it is you're trying to to, you know, get a good look at once you're starting to get that look you don't want to hear, Hey, we have to fly it back because the batteries are dying, or you know, if it's running on some other kind of fuel that the fuels running out, we have to move it back or else it's not going to be able

to fly anymore. If you have a vehicle that can recharge batteries on on the go or even generate enough electricity to fly just from the solar panels alone, which would be a big challenge. Not all U a v s are small. I mean we're used to the ones that are in the consumer level where it's a little the Parrot a R drones, even those are are you know, they're bigger than some of the teeny tiny ones, but

they're still not that big. Some of the military ones are enormous, like the size of a small jet, so then you have a lot more surface area to cover. But you know, for the smaller drones that's an issue. But then we've got actual some some great examples as some of these look really funky, and it's not a huge surprise because in order of you to get that amount of lift and be able to maintain flight kind

of make some engineering decisions. You know, once again we get to a point where anything that is not necessary for flight you leave off the plane. A lot of these have have gear that will allow it to roll and then take off and then drops off the plane. And then the way you land the plane is you

crash the plane. That's not a joke. That's actually built into a lot of these solar powered planes because you don't want that weight of that landing gear to be another consideration, Okay, people have people have different priorities than well. To be fair, these these planes are not traveling at speeds that you are used to. These planes like like one of the ones we're going to talk about is

goes to a nice leisurely pace. As far as planes are concerned, You're I'm just thinking about destroying the expensive equipment are potentially destroying. I mean, I'm sure that maybe there's like a water touchdown involved kind of yeah, scild of mattresses, right, well, I would think catcher's glove. If you're talking about solar powered unmanned aerial vehicles, one of the top goals it would seem like would be to have a vehicle that didn't have to land, like that

could sustain itself in the air. I don't know how feasible. I mean, even when you're in the sky, you have to deal with clouds because I would bet vehicles that are powered by solar have some altitude limitations. But if you could get above the clouds, I mean, that would be a sure a really cool thing. I mean, and we have examples of things like spy balloons that have solar panels on the board down Google's project. Yeah, there you go. And that's another one that's not even a

spy thing. That's that's delivering WiFi via balloons that are floating above the clouds. Not a spy thing that we know of. Google. Yah, my favorite. We've told the story a couple of times, but I just love how Google showed up at this Australian couple like Google in black. Yeah, They're like, it was New Zealand. Was it was New Zealand, You're right, this New Zealand couple's home and they said, hey, we want to put this on top of your house. We can't tell you what it's for. And they said okay.

Turned out it was WiFi, and they came back and said, you have WiFi. Congrats, Do we have anything else? We're never going to time to make Facebook accounts for your sheep. So I thought, I thought it'd be fun to dis ribe one of these unmanned aerial vehicles and explain how how weird it looks compared to classic aircraft. So NASA has one called the Helios Plane, and it's got a wingspan of seventy five meters, which is two hundred forty seven feet, so it's two or four seven feet wide.

This is a common theme you'll see in these solar powered aircraft. Yeah, they have these huge wingspans for multiple reasons. One of the big ones is that you need enough land space there to put all the solar panels down just to generate the electricity you need. But body length is only three point seven meters or twelve feet, So it's two hundred forty seven ft wide and twelve feet long. Okay, So yeah, thing looks a little weird. You just kind

of assume it's sideways. Yeah, you're like, like, wow, why are the wings so stubby? No, that's the body of the aircraft. What. Yeah, So these if you want to compare that to a seven forty seven. Uh, the seven forty seven has a wingspan of sixty four point three eaters, which is two hundred eleven feet, So the Helios plane has a wider wing span than a seven forty seven does. If you had these two side by side, the Helios would look much wider, but it's also much shorter. It's

also very very lightweight. It weighs nine ms, which is two thousand, forty eight pounds, whereas the seven forty seven that's fully loaded as in like passengers and luggage and everything champagne service, yeah, can be closer to three ninety seven thousand kilograms or eight hundred seventy five thousand pounds. So two thousand two compared to a hundred seventy five

thousand is a pretty big difference, you know. I would imagine another good reason for having those long, long wings compared to the size of the plane is that it generates more left that way, and in a lot of ways, these solar powered aircraft are very similar to gliders. They generate not only are they generating a lot left, but they're trying to take advantage of every little bit of

of wind. They can get. Uh, they aren't always able to take off in super windy conditions because really anything where you've got winds over ten miles per hour is problematic because they just they have these this enormous wingspan that can easily be affected by these gusts of wind

and then you have a disastrous take off. Sure but right if if you can avoid having to run your engine as often or as uh powerfully as much, yeah, yeah, then you you can take a lot of these, by the way, have their propellers um directly wired to the solar panels, so they often also have batteries on board.

It's not like they don't have a battery, but in fact, most of the time they have pretty cool batteries that are in sheet form, so they're they're like again, because you want to conserve space, you don't want it to have a concentrate amount of weight right in one part of the plane. It distributes the weight and uh and makes it so it's not so so bulky. But uh, you know, you're relying as much as you can on the solar power as possible, and then you switch over

to bad reef or anything else. Um, do you also have one A company called kinetic with cues excuse yeah instead of case um and make a fast food menu item spelling there. There's is called the Zephyr, which is a solar powered unmanned aircraft that stayed aloft for two weeks straight. So that's the current record holder for solar aircraft staying aloft, So two weeks fourteen days of being in the air before it landed again. So proof of concept of this idea of having something perpetually in the air.

It was actually so impressive that the Red Hot Chili Peppers wrote a terrible song about it. Yeah, and as only the Red Hot Chili Peppers can do. Uh, so the little commentary from from Jonathan and Joe. Then we have the Solar Impulse. This is one that that made the news, um, just like a year ago. Uh. The Solar Impulse holds the record for the longest manned solar powered aircraft light at twenty six hours, ten minutes and nineteen seconds. So this one actually has a human pilot.

This is not a U A V like the other ones we've talked about. Uh. And the Solar Impulse, to which is not launched yet both literally and figuratively, it will do that next year. Uh, it has got an incredible goal of circumnavigating the Earth. Now here's where we get into that speed thing I was talking about, Lauren. So we usually think of airplanes traveling at really fast speeds like like five or usually even faster for a commercial jet. Right, So the solar impulse too is not

going to go anywhere near that. The top speed of the solar impulse too is actually eight miles per hour. Now you're talking about an aircraft going around the entire Earth, and they're not going to cheat by going up around the north. The top fits um. So you can imagine this is going to mean that it's going to go days over oceans without stopping. Um and kind of scary. And you think this is a manned vehicle. It's actually

designed for two people to a pilot and a co pilot. Uh. The chairs are very special on board this aircraft because they absorb the heat from your butt and turn that into usable energy. Sadly no, but what they do do and do do is a great worry putting it. So the chairs are not just chairs, they're also caughts and they're also toilets because they don't they can't build all this extra stuff in the plane. They have to conserve

as much weight as they possibly can. Why hasn't the chair slash caught slash toilet caught on in a domestic way. I don't know what you're talking about. The chairs at my house. You guys want to come over anyway, don't at all? Really, any chair can be a toilet. You just get an exact o knife and and willpower is

what it takes, and then that's it. Also, I really want to say that I think that if we combine Joe's but heat energy uh source idea with the giant idea, if we can get giants and harness their butt heat. I don't know, I've always heard that giants just have cold tushes, But I mean I'm not I'm not read

up on the lore, so I could be wrong. Yeah. Anyway, So this, this circumnavigating the globe to get back to the actual story here will probably take around five months to get to get all the way around the earth um and the Just in case you're wondering, like, well, what else is going to be aboard the plane in case of disaster, they will have a survival kit and a life raft. I hope they've got somebody keeping track

of them. Well, I'm sure they'll have that too, But I mean there, you know, when it comes to the stuff that's actually on the plane you're talking about, you know again you want the minimum amout stuff because you want to conserve as much a weight as you can. Then. Uh, there there are other examples of you A V S that we could talk about. Most of them are are

have you know, potential military applications. But really I want to kind of transition into just a discussion about where do we benefit from these sort of of solar powered vehicles. Most of the ones we've talked about here with maybe you know, some consumer cars are an exception, and some of the boats are an exception, but most of these are vehicles that are not meant to have any kind of application outside of what they're currently attempting to do,

like break some records. But we can still benefit from this in multiple ways, right. I mean, you you have engineers working on building more efficient solar panels, which can benefit us in all sorts of applications, not just in these concept or or prototype vehicles. Uh. You have engineers coming up with new ways to create lightweight material that's resilient and can withstand the forces that a vehicle typically encounters. Also coming up with new designs for vehicles so that

they are are as fit efficient as possible. That can spill over into more classic vehicles, which means if you have a car that's made out of a very sturdy, lightweight material and it's really aerodynamic, and it's benefited from this research, then you're going to be using less. Whatever fuel you actually use, you probably aren't going to be using pure solar energy. It's just not really practical. But whatever you are using, you won't be wasting a lot

of it. Sure, this could also drive some battery technology if you're combining, if if it's a solar electric hybrid, then advancements in batteries could help everyone. So I'm really excited by the solar impulse to rite. I'm really excited to see how this shapes up and how they they are able to make this happen. I fully believe it's going to happen, that they're going to be able to circumnavigate the globe. It's going to be a true endurance test.

I mean, I assume they are going to have to stop occasionally because you've got to get stuff to eat and everything. I think that food. Yeah, that's my question. But the fact my question it's always this. Yeah, no, it's mine too. But the idea here is really cool, this idea of creating an engineering challenge to overcome and knowing that while it maybe a while before the rest of us see a direct benefit from this technology that's coming down the road. No pun intended. Your solar powered cars.

I would like to go on record and say I don't think the idea of a solar powered ground vehicle is entirely ludicrous for some certain applications. I mean, I can maybe see a future if we have very increased efficiency on solar panels, you might have say some kind of uh city transit vehicle for single passenger movement between point A and point B. Or maybe that that solar bus thing really does have a future if we if we increase that efficiency and and the materials technology to

create more lightweight, safer busses. I definitely see solar power, even if we never see it as the primary energy source for a vehicle. I definitely see it as being one of the important ways that we used to generate the electricity that charges the batteries on board these electric vehicles, or even using solar power to do something else, such as to use electrolysis on water and thus generate hydrogen, which you would use in a maybe a hydrogen powered car,

hydrogen fuel cell vehicle. Yeah, I'd say there's no question about stuff like that. When it comes to directly powered vehicles that have direct solar power, I don't know where do you need vehicles that can go at low speed, one passenger at a time, at a place where there's a lot of sunlights. That's that's tough because I would normally say a city, But the problem with cities is that you've got lots of buildings, so you don't have a lot of direct sunlight. So night Vale, it's always

night there. Actually, it's not sure that the sun rises and sets whenever it wants to in night Vale. Your your personal desert transit vehicle, Yeah, whenever you need to get out to that one special cactus, right. Yeah, and you you're not on a super tight schedule to do it. But it is, like we said, it is important for us to look into these technologies because they will benefit us further than the line. So we're gonna wrap this up. Guys, if you have suggestions for topics you would like us

to talk about in the future. Maybe there's some future technology that has really got you excited and you can't believe that we haven't talked about it yet. Well let us know. Send us a message. Our email is FW thinking at discovery dot com, or drop us a line on the social networks to be frequent to include Facebook, Twitter, and Google Plus. We have to handle f W thinking at all three and we will talk to you again

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