At 7:43 a.m. PST on 28 February 1998, a white, sailplane-like aircraft with a 116-foot wingspan took off from Edwards Air Force Base, climbed to 32,000 feet, and flew for fifty-six minutes without a pilot touching the controls. The RQ-4 Global Hawk, developed by Teledyne Ryan Aeronautical under DARPA’s Advanced Concept Technology Demonstration program, performed the entire mission autonomously, including takeoff and landing. It was the first high-altitude, long-endurance (HALE) UAV designed to survey an area the size of Illinois in a single sortie, and it could remain aloft for more than forty hours at altitudes up to 65,000 feet. The Global Hawk’s synthetic-aperture radar and electro-optical/infrared sensors provided near-real-time imagery to commanders across continents. In 2001, prototype aircraft were pressed into combat over Afghanistan before production models were even delivered. By September 2013, the Global Hawk fleet had logged 100,000 flight hours, 75 percent of them in combat zones. The aircraft’s descendants include the MQ-4C Triton for the U.S. Navy and NATO’s Alliance Ground Surveillance fleet. In an era when persistence is as valuable as precision, the Global Hawk proved that the unmanned eye could watch the world without ever blinking.