My personal imagination tells me that the potention real-world application of this is that solar powered UAVs with sufficient battery capacity to get them through the night could be launched for long missions of weeks, months or years.
With further advances thes vehicles could possibly maintain altitudes above weather and commercial traffic.
The commercial and/or military applications are huge. These vehicles could essentially perform roles currently only available to satellites at a fraction of the cost. A bit scary too... Big brother gets closer and closer.
Google would probably deploy a few thousand of them to provide low cost broadband to the world (in lieu of it's fanciful blimp idea). By my calculations they would need around 4000 of them to cover the entire globe at 200NM spacing. Obviously the poles would be a problem in winter.
The point of an around the world "stunt" in a manned vehicle isn't to demonstrate that we could all someday be flying in solar powered A380's. The point is to generate media attention, the attention of scientific bodies and governments, the attention of venture capitalists looking for the next big thing, and to get you and I talking.
It's not beyond my imagination that we could develop the technology to the point where we could launch a low cost UAV to FL500 and leave it on a set course (or a holding pattern) for a year or so carrying a useful communications payload.
Last edited by Derfred; 11th May 2016 at 17:48.
Reason: Edit: just calculated how many google would need