Flight delays are a bane of modern life but nobody would have been complaining when Solar Impulse 2 arrived in San Francisco, more than a year after it took off from Abu Dhabi. The ambitious goal of completing the first circumnavigation of the globe using nothing but the energy of the sun meant a few hiccups – such as the battery problems that stranded the high-tech plane in Hawaii for nine months – are inevitable.
If this was easy, it would have been done before. As United States president John F Kennedy said in 1962, the US chose formidable goals such as landing on the moon “not because they are easy, but because they are hard, because that goal will serve to organise and measure the best of our energies and skills”.
That sentiment perfectly describes Masdar’s sponsoring of Solar Impulse 2 to show the potential of clean energy. If anything, the delay has made the team’s achievement – and the need to show the technology can work in the real world – even more valuable.
