Good catch, Lindy. You and some others here may recall, going back to the late 1990s, the visions espoused by the likes of Alexander Haig (actually, Haig merely fronted the initiative) in connection with SkyStation and other long-term, high-altitude platforms that proposed the use of dirigibles as cell sites and Internet connectivity relay stations in the sky. We posted about those frequently on the original FCTF board and on the Last Mile Technologies board here in SI. Here's one such blast from the past (there are many others), which I was able to glean by performing a routine Web search (amazingly, since not even my SI search privileges permit me to go back as far):
Message 1617562
[The references are so old that readers may want to use the way-back machine (at archive.org ) to track some of them down.]
Returning to the present: With advances in solar-powering, which would be required for radio relay gear and minor navigational course adjustments to keep the craft relatively stabilized to a stationary position, it wouldn't surprise me to see some of those earlier ventures reactivated or aped anew, thus serving civilian purposes in the realm of Internet, M2M and other useful applications, as well as those that are unique to military ends, if they haven't already been resurrected by now.
Who knows. Maybe by applying a variation on Occam's Razor** to the problem of providing sufficient back-haul capacity, as is currently the nemesis faced by most mobile service providers today, will allow for an easy out, yet.
** From Wikipedia: en.wikipedia.org
FAC
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