Uses for Solar Powered planes

Solar Impulse takes flight in Video

Successful flight for solar powered plane

The two word buttons above take you to two other articles (blogs) I have written on the subject both have links to other news articles and videos regarding the new Solar Impluse Plane that will be flown around the world in 2012.

For those of you not familiar with some of the uses of solar powered planes beyond children's toys the applications are many. So, a solar powered plane that can actually carry people is something remarkable and even more remarkable if it can carry people worldwide then we are on to something really big, even if people used a helium balloon or even blimp to lift it into the air and then released it as a form of take off, if it actually flew around the world it could change everything as much as the Wright Brothers did and as Much as Lindbergh  did when he first flew across the Atlantic ocean over Great Britain to Paris,  France in the late 1920s.

One of the other uses is as a 12 hour a day hovercraft that could hover above almost any clouds potentially and to act as a GPS Satellite or other weather satellite or  reconnaissance vehicle. It could be a mass transportation vehicle if it was a very large vehicle or it could be used to transport mail or other lighter packages worldwide if they could move slowly at under 100 mph for example.  But I see it's main use for now as a replacement device 12 hours a day that could take the place of other satellites in space. This could greatly reduce space junk of satellites that go bad or wear out and just stay up their until they slowly degrade in orbit until they fall on someone like a burning ember or bus from space. The eventual uses for this expanding solar-electric flight and other possibilities are eventually almost endless as the efficiency of all solar cells continually increase exponentially just like computer chips did in the 1980s until now and will increase in efficiency (both will) on into the foreseeable future.