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Google Confirms Purchase Of Titan Aerospace For Data Drone Effort

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This article is more than 9 years old.

UPDATE: Google has confirmed to Forbes that it has purchased solar drone maker, Titan Aerospace. A Google spokesperson offered this statement on the deal:

“Titan Aerospace and Google share a profound optimism about the potential for technology to improve the world. It’s still early days, but atmospheric satellites could help bring internet access to millions of people, and help solve other problems, including disaster relief and environmental damage like deforestation. It’s why we’re so excited to welcome Titan Aerospace to the Google family.”

Last month reports started to circulate that Facebook was looking into buying Titan Aerospace, a New Mexico maker of solar powered drones that basically function as satellites, but cruise around the upper atmosphere pretty much indefinitely. The New Mexico headquarters of Titan is not far from my home, so I immediately started requesting an interview and/or visit. My requests were met with strange and stoney silence, but perhaps today I know the reason why: As the Wall Street Journal first reported and Forbes has now confirmed: Google, not Facebook, has gone ahead and acquired Titan Aerospace.

WSJ reports that Titan's small team of about twenty will stay in New Mexico and will work closely with Google's Project Loon team, a Google X project that has been testing the use of high-altitude balloons that could be capable of delivering internet access to hard to reach places.

Titan's thin craft look somewhat like a dragonfly covered with solar cells, and the company claims it can transmit data to the ground from heights nearly twice as far above the ground as the elevation most passenger airlines cruise at. Formed in 2012, the company has been developing two models of unmanned aerial vehicle, the Solara 50 and Solara 60 that are designed to stay aloft continuously for as long as 5 years.

Last November, Titan named Vern Raburn as its CEO, who was once CEO of Symantec and involved in the early years of Microsoft , but more recently helped to pioneer a new segment of the aviation industry with Eclipse Aviation, another Albuquerque area startup that made the first very lightweight jets. The Eclipse star crashed and burned just as quickly as it rose. After sinking over a billion dollars into the development of the original Eclipse 500 jet, the company was taken down by the economic crash of 2008 and the recession that followed, eventually going bankrupt in 2009.

No price was disclosed for Google's  purchase of Titan.

Facebook, meanwhile, has moved on from Titan and purchased another drone-maker called Ascenta.

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