The idea may sound completely off the wall, but the Federal Communications Commission has already begun the decision-making process on whether or not to approve a new communications technology that would involve the launching of floating platforms 100,000 feet in the air, as a cheaper and much higher-power alternative to satellites. The idea is being proposed by Chantilly, Virginia-based Sky Station International Inc. At 100,000 feet – for comparison, subsonic airliners typically cruise at 30,000 feet, Concorde at 50,000 feet – the platforms would be much closer to the earth than satellites and thus would have much higher information- carrying capacity, paving the way for a cordless Internet, the company suggests. Sky Station reckons it would cost $800m to put 250 of the platforms in the air worldwide. The Iridium 66-satellite mobile telephony project is budgeted at $4,000m. The unmanned platforms would be buoyed by flammable Hydrogen rather than Helium, and would be kept in position by an ion engine. They would be too high to be visible to the naked eye – unless one was struck by lightning and caught fire. An ion engine typically consists of an electric discharge chamber in which inert Xenon gas is ionised; the inner wall of the chamber is protected by a magnetic field to prevent loss of the ionised gas until a burst is needed to propel the platform back onto station, and is powered by electricity collected by solar panels – a high voltage but very little current is required for ionization.
