Didn't I hear a lot of talk about high-altitude super-endurance gliders that could go up hundreds of thousands of feet in the air for months at a time, that could act as a communications hub like a satellite, but much easier to launch and maintain? I'm pretty sure I saw a PBS special about this sort of plane, it was an ultralight plane that used solar panels all along its one very large wing to power its propellers. It was unmanned, of course.