[jthomaslm]

This is a concern for us. As with many disruptive technical advancements (e.g. in Nuclear or AI), there are many ways our technology can be used - both good and bad. It's important to us that what we do is ethical - that means supporting and pursuing use cases with huge positive societal value like rural connectivity or wildfire monitoring. With that said, there are definitely ethically-questionable use cases for this technology and I don’t underestimate how difficult it will be to navigate. We certainly have no intention of monitoring civilian populations and haven’t spoken to any police forces about what we’re doing.

[bglazer]

I'm glad to hear that, I hope you stick to those principles if the police or military come calling. They have deep pockets and your investors will want their 100x.

[nosequel]

Making their plane military-approved would be extremely costly and frankly it probably wouldn't work. There have been a lot of people commenting about the military clearly wanting this and taking over the project, but what makes a plane like this possible is not having the same requirements as military aircraft.

My biggest concern would be weight & power. This plane only works if it stays light and doesn't use a lot of power. If the military wanted this for live video or EO/IR, how would that communicate with ground sensors? KU satcom, UHF? Will it have IFF onboard, will it meet all the no-single-point-of-failure requirements? Everything the military requires will start using up a ton of power and adding a ton of weight. I get people always think these things will be used for evil, but it isn't exactly easy to take something civilian and suddenly ship it off to some USAF squadron.