As revealed by the British newspaper The Guardian , Google is conducting secret tests at Spaceport America (New Mexico) , facilities created by Virgin Galactic, the company founded by British magnate Richard Branson to launch future commercial space flights. Google's goal is to bring the internet to all corners of the globe by filling the sky with thousands of solar-powered drones, although it appears that they are also experimenting with optionally piloted aircraft (OPA).
In addition, it would not be just any connection: the North American search engine giant intends to make the so-called millimeter wave bands a new standard, which would multiply the data transmission speed of the current 4G by 40. One of the advantages of this technology is that it would be deployed in a different spectrum from the already saturated one that mobile phones occupy, but Google engineers must solve a serious problem: the short range of millimeter waves, ten times less than that of 4G .
The project, which is codenamed SkyBender , joins another with a similar philosophy, the Loon project, which investigates the possibilities of spreading the internet worldwide with a network of balloons that would float on the edge of outer space. One of the devices that Google is supposedly experimenting with now at the New Mexico aerospace terminal is the Solara 50 drone, whose wings reach a wingspan of 50 meters. In theory, it can fly uninterrupted for five years on solar energy collected by solar panels that completely cover its fuselage.
