Breaking news: Elon Musk wants to build a plane. An electric one! Are you surprised? Me either…after all, if he builds the fastest electric cars on earth, what’s the next logical step?
I don’t want to be negativist, but what about the range? How large should be the batteries to provide a decent range without adding too much weight to the plane? Well, he says that, in the future, it will be possible that lithium-ion batteries to provide enough capacity to power a plane.
Elon Musk is not only implicated in Tesla project, but he also founded back in 2002 Space Exploration Technologies Corporation (SpaceX), with the purpose of enabling Mars’ colonization. The company had developed and built two launch reusable vehicles and a spacecraft, called Dragon, which attached to the International Space Station, supplying it with cargo. He is also the chairman and co-founder of SolarCity, a company that designs, finances and installs solar power systems.
In the film below, at the 18th minute, he speaks about “the vertical takeoff and landing electric jet “. “I think I have something that might close…I’m quite tempted to do something about it”. He doesn’t specify how he intends to do it, but he seems quite deepened in his idea, and that makes me suppose he’s pretty serious about building the jet. Anyway, the whole video is interesting, so you might want to watch it.
Surely, he’s not the first one to build an electric plane. Though many companies are currently developing planes, they are experiments and most of them use solar energy as propulsion.
