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Google's Project Loon Can Now Launch Up To 20 Balloons Per Day, Fly 10x Longer 116

Posted by timothy from the first-they-said-you-were-crazy dept.
An anonymous reader writes Google [Thursday] shared an update from Project Loon, the company's initiative to bring high-speed Internet access to remote areas of the world via hot air balloons. Google says it now has the ability to launch up to 20 of these balloons per day. This is in part possible because the company has improved its autofill equipment to a point where it can fill a balloon in under five minutes. This is a major achievement, given that Google says filling a Project Loon balloon with enough air so that it is ready for flight is the equivalent of inflating 7,000 party balloons.
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Google's Project Loon Can Now Launch Up To 20 Balloons Per Day, Fly 10x Longer More

Google's Project Loon Can Now Launch Up To 20 Balloons Per Day, Fly 10x Longer

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  • frist loony sist eleventyone.

    • I did a little googling (har) and didn't find much in the way of environmental impact studies. How will all this affect air traffic? Bird migrations? The atmosphere, when releasing helium (or whatever) during a descent? Who is going to clean up the mess when, not if, the balloons get caught up in a storm and go down in the middle of the Pacific, or get strewn across the Himalayas?

  • What happened to actual units like cubic-meters? Too difficult for slashdot? Or is the number to small and just shows that "Google engineering" is not nearly as impressive as some people want it to look?

  • No hot air (Score:4, Informative)

    by jamesl ( 106902 ) on Saturday November 22, 2014 @06:28AM (#48439559)

    ... access to remote areas of the world via hot air balloons.

    These are not hot air balloons.

    The inflatable part of the balloon is called a balloon envelope. A well-made balloon envelope is critical for allowing a balloon to last around 100 days in the stratosphere. Loonâ(TM)s balloon envelopes are made from sheets of polyethylene plastic, and they measure fifteen meters wide by twelve meters tall when fully inflated. When a balloon is ready to be taken out of service, gas is released from the envelope to bring the balloon down to Earth in a controlled descent. In the unlikely event that a balloon drops too quickly, a parachute attached to the top of the envelope is deployed.
    http://www.google.com/loon/how... [google.com]

    • Why do you say they are not hot air balloons? The article is pretty clear they are. You quote do not say otherwise.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by OzPeter ( 195038 )

        Why do you say they are not hot air balloons? The article is pretty clear they are. You quote do not say otherwise.

        Just because it's on the internet doesn't make it correct.

        The pictures in the TFA are not of hot air balloons. They are of helium balloons. And engineering wise, no hot air balloon in capable of the stats that google is claiming.

        • This is not the only article talking about hot air filled balloons. The text is talking about hot air, not matter what the picture is. Even the Loon project web site is not clear about this.

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by OzPeter ( 195038 )

            This is not the only article talking about hot air filled balloons. The text is talking about hot air, not matter what the picture is. Even the Loon project web site is not clear about this.

            Yet somehow the Wikipedia site happily identifies the balloons as being He filled [wikipedia.org]

            Whoever wrote the text that everyone else is quoting screwed up big time, and is totally wrong about these balloons being hot air based. As I stated before, the photos are of classic Helium balloons, and no hot air balloon can do what google is claiming - that is basic physics.

            • I wonder how someone can happily identifies the balloons as being He filled on Wikipedia without an authoritative source saying so? I mean, nothing on the Loon website itself clearly says the balloons are He filled. The most it says, is the balloons are He filled for leaking tests where they use an He detector to identify the leaks. Nowhere the website says the balloons are filled with He when flying. Maybe they are intentionally obscure about He to let us think it is air filled or filled with another gas.

              • Re: (Score:2)

                by OzPeter ( 195038 )

                Maybe they are intentionally obscure about He to let us think it is air filled or filled with another gas.

                Ah .. I see you going the way of a conspiracy theory in order to avoid accepting common sense. Occams razor be damned!

      • Just think how much energy it would take to maintain the hot air. Its simply not practical.
        • Altitude is controlled pumping air in and out. There is a solar cells which could be use to maintain air temperature. The Loon site is unclear about the gas. The only reference to helium is for leak detection tests.
          • Try some critical thinking on the hot air idea. Look at the pictures as well, they clearly are filling the balloons from a compressed gas source.

            • Re: (Score:2)

              by OzPeter ( 195038 )

              Try some critical thinking

              But critical thinking is hard.

              And so is taking a step back and re-thinking when multiple people say something is not being correctly reported.

          • The only reference to helium is for leak detection tests.

            Because you can measure hot air balloon leaks by looking for helium?

    • This text does not tell what the balloon is inflated with

    • So, Google has hit upon an idea to further deplete our already-scarce helium reserves. Bravo. When are we going to stop letting dickheads with money squander global resources and start centrally allocating on basis of need instead? Fucking mega-corporations.
  • Amazing to see what Google is upto these days :D

  • You can fill it with as much air as you want, and it wont fly.

    And that is not what the google statement says

    • Maybe Google is recycling politicians into Loon pilots/air heaters combo.

    • If you fill it with pure nitrogen, the majority component of air, it should be possible to get some buoyancy out of it and still have a tenuous justification for calling it air. The balloons would have to be pretty enormous, though.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by drolli ( 522659 )

        No, calling Nitrogen Air is as justified as calling Helium Air.

        Colloquially air is something you can breathe without dying.

        Technically air is well defined as a mixture of gases.

  • Is this project real, or just a sly attempt by Google to corner the market for helium?

  • Helium is a totally nonrenewal resource, extremely valuable for thousands of important applications like MRI machines and other superconductors, and yet the US govt is selling off its reserve at cutrate prices that encourages party balloons and other wasteful uses. Helium will likely become a scarce resource that impacts national security and we're being stupid about managing its future supply.
    • At least Helium is something that the U.S. has a natural resource that somebody else wants.
      I doubt the Arab nations are as freaked out about depleting their oil as we are about depleting our helium.
      This kind of reminds me about a time at work where we had 20 terabytes on a SAN, most of which was unused. One of my projects was using about 300 GB on the SAN and IT was freaking out about it. "The storage costs $10,000 per terabyte!". My thinking is that it costs $10,000 per terabyte to leave it sitting ther

    • Yes, the government fsck'd up the helium market, but for applications like this it isn't that big of a deal. You can use hydrogen instead, although the flight time will likely be half due to leaks. For a while there was a good bit of research into using hydrogen as a deep diving gas in place of helium, but pesky safety issues got in the way.

    • Most helium from the earth is just vented right now, the "shortage" is artificial. And it can be recovered from atmosphere just at greater cost than from venting at natural gas sites, which in the future will be how it is "mined". We'll never run out on any timescale that matters, the loss to outer space is only concern over geological time spans. Only economic "shortage", not material one.

      • Air is 5 ppm helium and 15 ppm neon. Neon lifts balloons too, but we don't use it because it's too expensive to recover from the air, and recovering helium is even more inefficient.

        We'll never run out on any timescale that matters, the loss to outer space is only concern over geological time spans.

        NOTHING is a concern over geological time periods! The Sun will eventually swallow the Earth- but nobody seems to care too much. Helium depletion on Earth will be a blip on a geological time scale, but during that blip helium will be just a memory to several thousand generations.

        Helium is for sissies anyway. I don't care if Donal

  • ...why cat food cans generally have pop-tops, but tuna fish cans generally don't?

    Project Loon strikes me this way: they are missing something obvious.

  • Surely we should only be using helium in a reusable way.
    • Like party balloons for children? Providing internet (communication/education/possibly employment) to millions of people in remote areas is a pretty responsible way to use helium in my book.

  • I'm pretty sure this is all just full of hot air.

  • I wonder how long until the balloons also carry stingrays

  • We cannot get anything faster than 28.8 in the parts of america that is 15 miles from a town. What gives? These people have a copper phone line, power and in some cases natural gas. But no high speed internet. They do not do windows updates or update the browser or plugins until night when the computer can download all night. And they do not have a router so we have a windows machine right on the Internet ready for the latest Windows attacks.

    I think Microsoft should pay a LOT to get broadband to those

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