Uber is foot steping to expand the scope of it's flying car experiment.the company just hired NASA engineer Mark Moore,who worked at the federal agency as an advanced engineer and basically kickstarted the current interest in vertical take-off and landing craft for short-haul urban flight with 2010 paper on the feasibility of the helicopter like vehicles.Moore will act as Director of Engineering at Uber Elevate,which is what the ride-hailing company calls it's exploration of airborne on-demand drives.
Moore's research into so-called VTOL-short for vertical takeoff and
landing, or more colloquially, flying cars-inspired at least one
billionaire technologist. After reading the white paper, Google
co-founder Larry Page secretly started and financed two Silicon Valley
startups, Zee Aero and Kitty Hawk, to develop the technology, Bloomberg
Businessweek reported last summer.
Now Moore is leaving the confines of the US National Aeronautics and
Space Administration, where he has spent the last 30 years, to join one
of Google's rivals: Uber Technologies.
Moore is taking on a new role as director of engineering for aviation
at the ride-hailing company, working on a flying car initiative known as
Uber Elevate. "I can't think of another company in a stronger position
to be the leader for this new ecosystem and make the urban electric VTOL
market real," he says.
Uber isn't constructing a flying car yet. In its own white paper published last October,
the company laid out a radical vision for airborne commutes and
identified technical challenges it said it wanted to help the nascent
industry solve, like noise pollution, vehicle efficiency and limited
battery life. Moore consulted on the paper and was impressed by the
company's vision and potential impact.
Moore acknowledged that
many obstacles stand in the way, and they're not only technical. He says
each flying car company would need to independently negotiate with
suppliers to get prices down, and lobby regulators to certify aircrafts
and relax air-traffic restrictions. But he says Uber, with its 55
million active riders, can uniquely demonstrate that there could be a
massive, profitable and safe market. "If you don't have a business case
that makes economic sense, than all of this is just a wild tech game and
not really a wise investment," Moore says.
Uber's vision is a seductive one, particularly for sci-fi fans. The
company envisions people taking conventional Ubers from their homes to
nearby "vertiports" that dot residential neighborhoods. Then they would
zoom up into the air and across town to the vertiport closest to their
offices. ("We don't need stinking bridges!" says Moore.) These air taxis
will only need ranges of between 50 to 100 miles, and Moore thinks that
they can be at least partially recharged while passengers are boarding
or exiting the aircraft. He also predicts we'll see several
well-engineered flying cars in the next one to three years and that
there will be human pilots, at least managing the onboard computers, for
the foreseeable future.
His move to Uber is a risky one. Moore says he's leaving NASA
one year before he's eligible for retirement and walking away from a
significant percentage of his pension and free health care for life "to
be in the right place at the right time to make this market real."
(Though it's probably safe to say that Uber, with some $11 billion on
its balance sheet, is making it worth his while.) Moore seems to be
disillusioned with NASA, saying the agency is leaving promising new
aviation markets to the private industry. "It's the federal government
who is best positioned to overcome extremely high levels of risks," he
says.
While NASA is larded with layers of bureaucracy and management, Uber Chief Executive Officer Travis Kalanick
has been closely involved in hatching his company's flying car plans,
Moore says. That is, when he's not distracted with his own political
crises, such as his role on President Donald Trump's advisory council,
which he relinquished last week after criticism from customers, drivers and employees.
Kalanick's
bet on Uber Elevate is another indication that while Silicon Valley
seems on the surface to be consumed with politics and protests these
days, the march into the future continues apace.
