NASA has made an air traffic control system for drones

This highly scalable approach may finally open the skies to a host of commercial drone applications that have yet to materialize. Amazon Prime Air launched in 2022 but was put on hold after crashes at a testing facility, for example. On any given day, only 8,500 or so unmanned aircraft fly in US airspace, the vast majority of which are used for recreational purposes rather than for services like search and rescue missions, real estate inspections, video surveillance, or farmland surveys. One obstacle to wider use has been concern over possible midair drone-to-drone collisions. This prevents most collisions but also most use cases, such as delivering medication to a patient's doorstep or dispatching a police drone to an active crime scene so first responders can better prepare before arriving.