Telecom's new jet age takes off.
Drive out of LA on Highway 14, into the Sierras. Beyond the freeway ramps, the high-tension power lines, and the tile-roofed tract homes clinging to niches in mountain slopes, you enter the immense emptiness of the desert.
Continue 30 miles north on 14, across the flat, haze-gray plateau punctuated with Joshua trees, and you reach the tiny town of Mojave. The highway cuts straight through town, past gas stations and motels bleached by the sun. A liquor store advertises ICE AND AMMO. The Best Motel offers rooms for $23 a night. Turn onto a side street dusted with sand and you come upon the Mojave Airport Civilian Flight Test Center. Here, inside ribbed-metal hangars opening straight onto the tarmac, businesses you've never heard of are developing flying machines you've only dreamed about.
Scaled Composites is one of them. Its founder, Burt Rutan, designed Voyager, the little airplane that captured the nation's imagination in 1986 when it completed the first-ever nonstop, unrefueled flight around the world. Rutan is one of aviation's greatest innovators. Under his guidance as president and CEO, Scaled Composites has fabricated everything from the prototype for the McDonnell Douglas DC-X single-stage-to-orbit space vehicle to an aerodynamic sail for a yacht that defended the America's Cup.
Today, in an echoing hangar, under the pale glare of mercury-vapor lamps, thirtyish guys in sneakers, jeans, and T-shirts are working on something slightly less esoteric: a gleaming white airplane named Proteus, with two pairs of wings (one fore and one aft), a pair of jet engines at the rear, and an arched fuselage terminating in a bulbous cockpit shaped like the head of a snake. Already Proteus has made more than a dozen test flights in preparation for its ultimate mission: to cruise at 60,000 feet, about twice as high as conventional passenger jets, where it can do the kind of tasks routinely done by satellites - mapping terrain, tracking storms, conducting surveillance.
Its greatest promise, however, is as a communications platform. It could bring broadband wireless voice, interactive video, and data services to American consumers three or four years ahead of low Earth orbit satellite constellations such as Teledesic, the $9 billion project partially financed by Bill Gates and Craig McCaw.
The idea sounds simple, but its execution will push aviation technology to new limits. A city can be served by a fleet of three Proteus airplanes, each carrying a 15-foot communications dish beneath its curved belly. One plane will circle for 8 hours, providing telecommunications for an area 50 to 75 miles in diameter. As it runs out of fuel, it hands off to the next plane, and so on, enabling uninterrupted 24-hour coverage. A subscriber to the service will use a toy-sized antenna to link its computers with the airplane, which will connect, in turn, with a ground station. Customers won't have to wait for fiber to be brought to their door to enjoy a data-transfer rate of 1 to 10 megabits per second. By comparison, a T1 runs at approximately 1.5 Mbps and is far more expensive. Also, unlike satellite systems or cable modems, whose consumers receive data faster than they can send it, the service's uplink and downlink will be equally speedy. Bulk users, such as ISPs, will be offered more than 50 Mbps.
Teledesic's satellites, of course, promise worldwide coverage. But that service won't be cheap, and in any case the great majority of customers are located in populated areas. "Low Earth orbit satellite systems squander 70 percent of their capacity over oceans, deserts, and ice caps," points out Peter H. Diamandis, president of the company that first approached Scaled Composites with the idea for telecom aircraft. "They provide broadband to penguins. We can focus 100 percent of our capacity over metropolitan and suburban regions of cities around the world." Thus the circling Proteuses could skim the prime markets, leaving satellite moguls such as Gates and McCaw to search for customers elsewhere. Will it work? Can a $9 billion scheme requiring more than 100 satellites be beaten out by mere airplanes?
Peter Diamandis is president of Angel Technologies, a privately held start-up in St. Louis. Angel not only initiated the Proteus project but is also developing the telecommunications electronics for it in collaboration with Raytheon. "We approached Burt Rutan directly," recalls Diamandis. "He told us to contact the aerospace company that owns Scaled Composites. They shared our vision and became a significant minority shareholder in Angel. So, it's a joint venture and a contract relationship. We have signed a fixed-price option agreement to take delivery of 100 aircraft over the next five to eight years."
Angel's business model is certainly seductive. Teledesic must launch almost all its satellites before the system can come online, but Angel can move incrementally, invading one market at a time and using the revenue stream to finance expansion. Since the Proteus planes will cost less than $10 million apiece, Diamandis figures that Angel needs to spend no more than $50 to $75 million to be up and running in each location. He claims that "we blow away satellites, financially."
He also cites technical advantages. Teledesic's 100-plus satellites will have a predicted working life of seven years, during which they cannot be serviced; when they fail, they have to be abandoned. A Proteus can be serviced anytime it's on the ground, and its electronics can be swapped out for a newer system with more capacity when there's sufficient demand. Best of all, the aircraft will be more than 30 times closer to users than a LEO satellite, and its jet engines will generate up to 25 kilowatts for communications. Consequently its transponder can send a much stronger signal, allowing ground-based transceivers and antennas to be cheap and small. The only snag is heavy rain, which may interfere with reception on the ground; but by flying above 50,000 feet, the airplane itself will evade almost all storms. Angel aims to offer its maximum data rate 99.7 percent of the time, with 0.1 percent downtime.
At Teledesic, spokesperson Roger Nyhus declines to comment on the feasibility of Angel's plan. "Their service is going after a very limited market," says Nyhus. "We can aggregate diffuse usage from around the globe. Our business model is to target those areas that would not receive broadband any other way. We will be targeting the suburban and rural areas of the developed world, and all of the less developed world."
At Scaled Composites, Matthew Gionta, project engineer of the Proteus program, sounds uncomfortable when he's asked about the plane's impact on satellite schemes. "I think Proteus has a place to supplement existing satellites," he says diplomatically.
Gionta is slim, earnest, and dedicated. He came to Mojave immediately after earning a master's in aerospace engineering at the State University of New York at Buffalo. So far, he's worked on three new airplanes in five years. As we walk around Proteus, he talks about the technical challenges. "The engines had to be modified," he explains, "because the plane will be flying at only 100 miles per hour - which is just crawling along, for a jet - in very rarefied air. Still, we've tested it successfully at 50,000 feet so far."
Above that altitude, loss of cabin pressure could kill the crew. So the pilots will be enclosed in a special pressure vessel, like a space capsule, enabling a shirtsleeve environment where the main enemy may be boredom. "But they'll have the best telecommunications package in the world sitting underneath them," says Gionta. "So, they could always surf the Web." He hesitates. "Just kidding, of course."
Joke or no, this raises an interesting question: Since the plane will be flying in circles for most of its lifetime, and every mission will be much the same as the last - why have pilots at all? "When Angel came to us about five years ago," Gionta recalls, "they wanted a UAV [unmanned air vehicle]. But we said we did not believe that the state of the art was good enough to park a 12,500-pound UAV over downtown Los Angeles."
Others think different. Another small company, AeroVironment, is developing Helios, a potential competitor to Proteus. Helios doesn't exist yet, though prototypes do. It will not only be unmanned, but will also require no fuel, being powered entirely by solar cells. Ultimately, with an electric storage system for overnight use, AeroVironment wants Helios to remain airborne continuously for six months at a time.
Head back south on Highway 14 and turn off at Rosamond, another low-rent desert town where rusting vehicles stand in the front yards of little old houses and an arid wind tosses tumbleweeds across the two-lane blacktop. Beyond the railroad tracks, head due east beside a dry lakebed. After 16 miles, you reach the center of Edwards Air Force Base: a residential facility beside the highway, a supermarket, administration buildings with windows tinted dark against the fierce sun, and cylindrical fuel tanks like giant coffee cans with military insignia painted on their sides.
After another couple of miles, make a right turn and you reach NASA's Dryden Flight Research Center. A full-size replica of an X-15 rocket plane stands outside the gates, its black silhouette looming against the intense sky. Inside the compound, in an enormous modern hangar, is Centurion, predecessor of Helios. Built by AeroVironment, it has flown test flights under battery power.
"Someone called it a flying yardstick," says John Del Frate, who administers the NASA project that has funded construction of the airplane. The quip is apt. This thing has no fuselage and no tail. It is nothing but a wing, 8 feet wide and an incredible 206 feet long, its surface of 0.5 mil transparent plastic revealing the skeletal struts and ribs beneath. Fourteen two-bladed propeller sets, with broad blades specially shaped to work in very thin air, are driven by electric motors along the leading edge.
It looks like an unfinished, vastly overgrown science-fair project. As yet, its solar panels have not been installed, though a smaller prototype, called Pathfinder-Plus, climbed to an amazing 80,200 feet under solar power alone. "In 1994," Del Frate explains, "we invited companies to collaborate with us on a unique basis. We help to finance their development of very high altitude aircraft. They have to share some of the technology, with NASA and each other, and contribute some resources of their own. And they have to do this on a nonprofit basis, although they can go commercial anytime, when they no longer need our support."
The objective here is to kick-start a new industry that can commercialize high-altitude vehicles. "Then NASA can use their services," says Del Frate.
AeroVironment is still two or three years from that goal. "To go to full production will take $50 to $60 million," says Del Frate. "The biggest technical hurdle is energy storage. Fortunately there's a lot of fuel cell work going on right now, mostly directed at the automotive market. The issue is not whether it can do what we want, but whether it can be light enough."
Even if the power-storage problem is solved, there's still the challenge of FAA certification. A spokesperson at the FAA sounded quite bemused when she was asked to imagine an unmanned airplane flying for six months above 60,000 feet. Her only official comment was that the altitude itself shouldn't be a problem, since other aircraft have been certified above 50,000 feet.
"Will they allow us to put it in the air continuously, even though it's above all the other traffic?" Del Frate wonders. "This is a new animal; there is no prior policy in this area."
Del Frate speaks softly, but behind his gentle exterior he's impatient with the pace of progress. "When I was a kid growing up in Albuquerque, I used to love reading Popular Science, Popular Mechanics, and science fiction," he says. "I fully expected, by the year 2000, we would be using flying cars and going to other planets on a routine basis. I'm disappointed; it's a bit depressing. Certainly I think flying cars would have been doable, if it hadn't been for the risk of litigation." He shrugs. "Still, within five years I believe we will see telecommunications via aircraft. And we may fly higher than is possible using any of the brute-force approaches. My mom is from Mexico, and she has a saying in Spanish which translates something like, 'Cleverness is more effective than power or strength.'"
He's referring indirectly to the airplane that holds the current altitude record: the Lockheed Martin SR-71 Blackbird, whose massive jet engines have pushed it close to 85,000 feet (the exact figure is classified). By coincidence, two of these long-bodied, ominous-looking monsters are maintained by NASA in a hangar at Dryden. The airplane was designed at Lockheed's legendary Skunk Works - and by an even stranger coincidence, a key figure in the Helios project, Ray Morgan, came from there.
Northwest of Los Angeles, among rugged mountains, Simi Valley is an oval bowl filled with red-roofed, cream-stuccoed suburban housing. Exit from the Ronald Reagan Freeway and eventually you find Industrial Street, a peaceful tree-lined backwater where concrete buildings house small businesses such as Speedy Press Service and Atlantic & Pacific Label Company. At the far end is AeroVironment's Design and Development Center, where Helios is one of several projects occupying the 55 employees at the site.
The company is an anachronism, building most components by hand, in-house, and selling a small assortment of miscellaneous commercial products. It was founded in 1971 by Paul MacCready, the ecologically oriented aerodynamicist who designed the Gossamer Condor, which in 1977 made the first controlled, human-powered airplane flight. The purpose of the company, according to MacCready, is "to help business and government recognize their environmental and energy objectives." He remains chair of the board, while vice president Ray Morgan guides the company's work with aircraft on a day-to-day basis.
Morgan's tiny office, next to the reception area, is full of traditional touches: an antique wooden drafting table by the window, a 1950s-style gray steel desk, and an old turn-the-handle pencil sharpener. A coffee mug carries the slogan TAKE TIME TO SERVE YOUR COUNTRY. Morgan himself looks conservative, neatly dressed in a brown waistcoat. He went to school in North Carolina and speaks like a Southern gentleman, but his formal style is misleading. Like Burt Rutan, he's a hardcore aviation radical. In this small facility, the company has designed and built 30 airplanes. It has also developed the prototype for GM's EV1 electric car and the SunRaycer, which won a solar-vehicle race across Australia.
Walking down a narrow hallway whose walls are covered with photos, awards, and certificates, Morgan pauses by a poster depicting a project for Darpa: the MicroBat. Barely larger than a dragonfly, it will fly by flapping its wings, and it will carry a tiny videocamera for surveillance. It's still a couple of years away from the market, but AeroVironment has built UAVs that are almost as small.
Defense-funded surveillance hardware might seem out of place at such an environmentally conscious company. Morgan agrees that it "creates some discussion." Still, he says, "I can't imagine the United States existing without a military, and one of the biggest environmental problems the military has is war. Nothing hurts the environment more. Carpet bombing is often done because they simply don't know what else to do. If you have good reconnaissance, that is an environmental help."
More to the point, the privately held AeroVironment needs military money to develop its unique technologies. "The government is the biggest risk taker," says Morgan. "They subsidized airmail in the 1930s, which led to civilian aviation. They subsidized Telstar in the 1960s, which led to communications satellites. I'm hoping that the solar-powered airplane will follow the Telstar model."
We walk into a workshop area where Centurion was built in sections. To assemble it, engineers had to take it outside to the parking lot. Morgan notices a model of the plane, about 3 feet wide, carved from Styrofoam. "This is representative of the stiffness of the actual airplane," he says, flexing it. In fact the wing of the full-size version is so supple, it can bend into a complete semicircle. "The flexibility allows it to absorb bumps, like an air mattress on the ocean," Morgan says.
He launches the model, and his obsession is obvious. He watches intently as it coasts across the room and looks satisfied as it settles gently to the floor. "I wasn't in an economic situation where I had flying models as a kid growing up," he says. "So now maybe I'm doing some of the things I couldn't do in my childhood."
He sees no special risk in flying over cities, because Helios will be so lightweight. "It takes six hours to descend from 80,000 feet, and there are four ways we can track where it is. Almost everything is triply redundant, and we have sensors that report if anything is wearing out. By comparison, bear in mind that anybody can construct a home-built airplane and fly it over your house with an engine weighing several hundred pounds, plus several hundred pounds of gasoline. Ours is a negligible risk by comparison.
"Once we've built it," he continues, "Helios will cost an order of magnitude less to run than a conventionally powered airplane. It will need no fuel and virtually no maintenance." Of course, that's assuming AeroVironment can overcome the technical hurdles and what Morgan calls the giggle factor. "We've been laughed out of the best offices in Washington," he admits with a shrug. "But many of the agencies that chased us away are now looking with interest. Darpa is seriously interested. To do what we're trying to do is harder than what they're doing at Scaled Composites, with Proteus; but once it's done, I think we will definitely get our market share. This technology will happen, and when it does, we will be the lowest cost operator. The only question is timing."
Timing is no small problem. At current funding levels from NASA, AeroVironment will have to wait till 2002 to install the $7 million worth of solar cells that a full-scale prototype requires. Meanwhile, Scaled Composites plans to finish flight-testing Proteus by the end of this year. FAA certification could take an additional three or four years, but the aircraft may go into service on a limited basis long before that.
"We're hoping for an exemption to enable us to serve a city such as Los Angeles by the end of 2000," says Peter Diamandis at Angel. "Since we won't be carrying passengers or cargo, and the FAA has offered exemptions for other airplanes, we think we should qualify. Obviously, we're in a race to capture market share."
That race is already crowded with competitors promoting dozens of satellite schemes. (See Carving up the Pie in the Sky.") So far, Iridium is the only LEO satellite telephone system that's operational. First may not be best: Its luxury-priced global voice-and-messaging service has been plagued with technical problems. Despite an official claim that 90 percent of calls go through, some say the connection rate is much worse.
As Roger Nyhus of Teledesic looks ahead to the launch of its even more ambitious system, he sounds unperturbed. "We're still five years away from service," he says, "but we fully expect to be the world's first broadband satellite-communications provider." Teledesic, however, has scaled back its initial plan to launch 840 satellites, and the technical challenges of multisatellite communications, coupled with Iridium's initial difficulties, make telecom airplanes an easier pitch than you might expect.
"People don't want to take $10 billion risks. With our system, you spend $50 or $75 million," asserts Peter Diamandis. And if it doesn't work as advertised, you don't have to abandon it like a satellite: "You can pick up your assets and take them someplace else."
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