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Last week a Japanese consortium invested $100 million in an Airbus project to commercialise a solar-powered plane that weighs about the same as one average human and flies not much faster than an average human can run. The Zephyr is actually less a plane than a fixed-wing dragonfly; an ultra-fragile “high altitude platform station” (HAPS) designed to fly for days on end above the weather beaming high-resolution images of Earth back to commercial clients and / or delivering broadband to places that don’t have it. It has been around since 2010 and developed through multiple iterations, initially for the UK’s defence ministry, but may now have a new lease on life thanks to improvements in battery technology. The challenge for Zephyr and HAPS like it has always been to be able to carry enough batteries to stay aloft at night, and the latest version can stay up for 26 days; twice as long as the one before it. So what? It’s cheaper than a satellite.