Titan Aerospace was an American aerospace company based in Moriarty, New Mexico. They developed and manufactured special drones. Since 2013, the company was run by Vern Raburn, former CEO of Eclipse Aviation, and prior to that, Symantec. Raburn was also an early employee of Microsoft during its start-up phase. In April 2014, Titan Aerospace announced its acquisition by Google Inc. Google planned to use Titan Aerospace to develop unmanned aerial vehicles capable of bringing Internet connectivity to remote parts of the world. In January 2017, Google announced that it was abandoning the project.
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Product
The company manufactured unmanned aircraft under the designation AtmoSat logo. The so-called "atmospheric satellites" or Solar Powered Atmospheric Satellite Drones travel up to 20 kilometers high, can have satellite typical functions, take for example weather and fire monitoring or space photography. Equipped with a solar drive they can, according to the company, fly continuously up to five years and thereby cover four million kilometers.
Type
The Solara AtmoSat platform offered customers around the world real-time images of the earth, voice and data services, navigation and mapping of services and monitoring systems of the atmosphere. The systems were able to provide signal coverage over 17,800 square kilometers, so a single Solara drone had a greater range than 100 terrestrial cell towers.
Purchase by Google
In mid-April 2014, it was announced that Google bought the company.
"Project Titan" was part of Google's Access division before being absorbed into the semi-secret R&D facility X during the Alphabet reshuffle in 2015, and was finally shut down in 2016.
According to Manager Magazine at the beginning of March 2014 Facebook offered $60 million to buy the company. Techcrunch further reported that Facebook wants to use the drones to supply areas with no internet connection with affordable network access.