Boeings SolarEagle Wins $89 Million Contract

The Boeing SolarEagle flys at 65,000 feet for 5 years straight and is powered by solar energy. It's wingspan is 435 feet and it can carry 1,000 pounds of surveillance equipment. The SolarEagle is the winner of DARPA's Vulture II program and will receive a $89 million contract. That is alot of money to spend on these long flying spy planes. These solar planes are pretty cool but I am questionable of their possible future usage. I would hate to have them watching over me and other citizens in the U.S.
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The info about the SolarEagle starts at 1min 20sec into the video.

There may hope for us yet....This is relieving despite the ongoing energy crisis the world is facing. This is the direction the United States needs to go. The less oil we depend on, the better.

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reply to post by laiguana


I agree I enjoy the fact there are projects that look to new non-oil consuming energy ideas. Solar power, different fuel sources and other ideas are the future as modern jet fueling ideas are out dated. The solar power used in the SolarEagle makes me think of other solar planes and other solar technology such as solar towers.

Solar powered transport aircraft are not possible simply because solar flux is extremely weak and unreliable (clouds, night). Gas turbine engines are very very very powerful pieces of machinery and jet fuel contains an extremely large amount of energy. Apparently a Boeing 747 has the same amount of power as a Nimitz nuclear powered aircraft carrier. What could be possible however, is powering aircraft with synfuels which generally need significant amounts of process heat on the ground to be created. Solar thermal could provide this process heat. And there's also future biofuels.

reply to post by C0bzz


Since the military is big on UAVs now, solar power could be applied in that area. In the fuel department I was thinking more along the line of more exotic propulsion systems being developed by the military that use different types of fuel.

I think this is very cool and interesting. This is so futuristic in design i am amazed.What i want to know is if it can be maybe Loaded with a JDAM? Or maybe even some clusters from a cluster bomb? Even if this craft is all about stealth and surveillance, Still Its flight is so high the enemies wont even know where its coming from!

PS: Is that 89 MIllion dollars to make one or multiple models????

reply to post by Rebel21



What they are building now wont be able to carry that heavy of a load to be able to carry any bombs. It will be for reconnaissance at high altitude for long duration, around 5 years. It takes alot of solar energy to power a large aircraft with bombs and I'm not sure the technology is there to do that. They may be able to improve this technology in the future to have larger manned solar airplanes. This still means once they finish, with the SolarEagle project, there will be eyes in the sky watching you all the time, because these won't have to come down for 5 years and who knows how many there will be. The contract that they received for $89 was only to develop this plane.

Boeing has approximately two and a half years, until 2014, to develop the aircraft, under the provisions of an $89 million agreement, officials at the corporation announced.

They may make a few, or just one to fully develop it. After that the government would have to buy them. They are basicaly giving them money to do there research and development.
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reply to post by I B Dazzlin


Solar power could only be applied to special task UAVs, like this one. There's simply not enough solar power to drive a fighter or bomber, even if we could extract solar power at unity.

As for exotic fuels - a fusion-powered aircraft might be in the future. There's a few ways to do this - first would be to use an electric turbine system coupled to a fusion power generator - this would only be reasonable in ultra-light fusion reactor concepts with direct conversion to electrical power (such as Plasma Focus). The second is to 'cool' the reactor using the flow of air through the turbine, thereby creating the thermal expansion necessary to drive the engine. This could be done with a single heavier reactor, or a number of lighter reactors seated in each engine or module.

The same applies to nuclear power - but people tend to get a little fidgety when you have Chernobyl flying over their heads.

That's about all the fuel there is out there, aside from various synthesized chemical fuels, compressed air, or something else that would be put together using a more powerful, centralized source of power. Discussing things like drawing from the "vacuum" are rather beyond the scope of this forum, and such discussions tend to exceed the rating of my tin-foil cap.

reply to post by Aim64C


I know that solar power can only be used in these uavs or small lightweight aircraft. I was not meaning that there would be solar bombers. I know that there are new fuel/energy production techniques being played with for future manned aeronautics but what I was thinking was that they could improve solar power and/or add it in combination with another energy source in to be used in uavs. From what I have read the future aircraft will be powered by fision or fusion.