Facebook has terminated its Aquila drone program

Facebook’s plans to beam high-speed Internet from enormous solar-powered drones in the stratosphere appear to be in disarray. Two key engineers behind its Aquila drones have left the company, and it recently cancelled plans for a secret high-altitude flight campaign at Spaceport America, possibly because Facebook no longer has any aircraft available to deploy.

spectrum.ieee.org...

code.facebook.com...

This is something almost anyone who was not a fanboy could have told facebook was a bad idea. UAVs have their place in the world, but acting as persistent data relays, ones that are part of vital infrastructure is really, really hard and probably too costly to ever be profitable. The atmosphere is a capricious place at best and to keep a fleet of com drones up without spending ridiculous amounts of money...is unlikely. And even WHEN you are spending lots of money, it's unlikely.

In a way, it's too bad they didn't try doing geospatial work with it. Mapping roads down to very high accuracy is worth a lot. Then again, maybe I don't want Facebook having THAT info, too.

a reply to: anzha

This is probably one of those deals that in a decade the technology will work. Hopefully facebook wont exist by then.

a reply to: gariac

Alas, its going to be around. Probably like Oracle is today. There, but not one of the dominant tech companies. Google will probably be like Microsoft. Though that might take 20 years instead of 10.