By Morgan Clendaniel

Solar Impulse is a solar-powered plane that is going to make an attempt at circumnavigating the globe sometime in 2015. In the meantime, its pilots Bertrand Piccard and André Broschberg are going to fly across America in May to garner some publicity for their longer trip. But first, they had to get the plane here from its home in Switzerland.

The video above is a fun time-lapse of them taking the plane apart and loading into a larger plane (a plane in a plane!). You get to see the interior of the super-lightweight aircraft as it's disassembled over seven days and then sent from Switzerland to San Francisco.

The plane flew a maiden voyage of 26 hours, powered the entire time by the sun and batteries charged from the sun, which kept it flying even during the night. The plane can only hold one person and doesn't really travel at the speeds we expect from air travel (it will take it about 25 days to fly around the world), so it's not as if we'll be all flying on solar planes any time soon. Still, the Solar Impulse is an engineering marvel. Take a look inside.

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