A Solar Ship aircraft in flight. Founded by Canadian entrepreneur Jay Godsall, the company builds solar-powered airships designed to move cargo and people into hard-to-reach regions.Supplied
Jay Godsall has watched the definition of the frontier evolve in real time.
More than a decade ago, the founder of Solar Ship – a Canadian company that designs and flies solar-powered airships to move people, aid and cargo into some of the world’s most remote and unforgiving environments – bought a satellite phone for a trip into northern Madagascar with what he describes as a “famous and difficult” high-profile client.
“It cost me $7,700 just to get the phone and then every minute was $100,” says Mr. Godsall, who founded Solar Ship in 2006. “Now, I could call the same place using WhatsApp for free and talk for two hours.”
In his world, adventure and risk are interchangeable. But he is careful to distinguish danger from fear.
“The world’s divided up with people who are willing to go into the unknown and try things and those who aren’t,” he says.
Raised in Ottawa, Mr. Godsall grew up around risk. His father was a “macho, risk-taking race car driver,” and through one of his father’s friends – another driver whose son was working on solar-powered airships in California – he first heard the idea that would later shape his life.
Entrepreneurial from an early age, he mowed lawns, shoveled driveways and drove cars to and from Florida for snowbirds. In high school, he befriended students from Burundi and found himself an unlikely guest at a lunch at the Burundian embassy, debating transportation logistics with representatives from other landlocked African countries, including Malawi, Rwanda and Zambia.
Mr. Godsall, whose grandfather was in the bush plane business, started rattling off transportation options. “Why don’t you get a train? They said, well, we don’t control the access to the coast. Why don’t you get a plane? Way too expensive. We’ll go bankrupt. And I said, ‘why don’t you get an airship? We’ll put a solar panel on it.”
The group seemed intrigued.
“I was just pitching them on the idea, because I’m in high school and Belgian french fries are on the table so why not?”
Jay Godsall (right) and test pilot Mark Taylor (left) inside a Solar Ship aircraft ahead of a test flight, part of the long trial-and-error process behind the company’s designs.Supplied
It was an intoxicating glimpse of the adventure ahead. But turning that glimpse into a company would take years – and more failure than foresight. Mr. Godsall had no formal engineering training and no clear roadmap for how to build an aircraft that didn’t yet exist. What he did have was a willingness to learn publicly and fail visibly.
After a chance encounter with an airship inventor, he launched his first venture in the 1990s with some help from the University of Toronto Institute of Aerospace Studies. The venture collapsed quickly when he couldn’t raise capital. For more than a decade he moved on – consulting across Africa, launching an infectious-disease diagnostics startup and learning how to operate in environments where risk is constant but manageable.
In 2004, he came back to the idea of a solar-powered airship, working again with University of Toronto students to prototype ideas. He registered Solar Ship in 2006.
“We put an absolutely terrible, pathetic ship in the air that was destined to crash and burn in 2008,” he says. But he didn’t give up.
They built tons of different versions – longer, wider, fatter, skinnier. The breakthrough came in 2014.
After years of prototypes and small gains, Solar Ship’s Caracal lifted a 1.8 tonne load and was able to take off and land within the distance of a 100‑metre soccer field on just two 30 kilowatt electric motors, setting records for electric short takeoff and landing – but the test ended in a crash that injured its pilots, a reminder that even proof of concept carries real risk.
“I’ll give you a little sense of the flight dynamics: boring, boring and boring,” he says. “It’s so smooth and so slow… you don’t feel anything.”
But, at speed, the momentum is hard to control – something that took years for Solar Ship to get right. “You must make everything balanced, there’s no arguing with these things,” he says. “You don’t argue with an elephant.”
Solar Ship’s aircraft are currently in test mode. To date, the company has completed test flights of 14 different airships, narrowing them down to two core designs that are now being scaled up. All of them are designed to unlock access to the world’s most extreme environments – from delivering cargo and aid to transporting critical minerals from remote, politically volatile environments.
The next step, Mr. Godsall says, is regulatory approval and a series of demonstration missions intended to prove that solar airships can operate reliably at scale.
Testing at Solar Ship has often meant learning the hard way — including after a crash that forced major changes to the company’s airship designs.Supplied
The first is an ambitious round-the-world flight planned for 2027, using the Tsorocopter – a solar-powered airship designed to carry up to 12 tonnes at low speed with a high degree of control. If successful, Solar Ship plans to begin operating the aircraft in Africa later that year.
“Africa’s our first target,” he says. “Everything we do there, we can put into a virtual aerospace environment and switch it to Amazon, the Arctic, Rockies, Australia, Indonesia – we’re building up a capability to operate in multiple places.”
A second, larger demonstration flight, using a hybrid airship capable of carrying heavier payloads, is planned for 2028 and would mark the start of broader global operations.
Mr. Godsall envisions a future where Solar Ships are used for air ambulances and tourism.
“There’s fear of the unknown with airships… fear and danger,” he says. “These things land hard and if you don’t get control over them, they’re dangerous – but if you get control over them, it gives you capabilities to go into these frontier areas beyond the reach of roads.”