[mathogre]

For a bit of background, go to: https://x.company/projects/loon/

I was working on the Air Traffic Control side of unmanned free balloons in 2020, and Loon was an exciting project. While it's a shame it wasn't financially viable, they had it working with up to 60-ish balloons in the stratosphere at any given time. This was an amazing accomplishment.

The navigation was equally amazing. It was Loon who did some real research on stratospheric weather. While many meteorological entities throughout the world knew and understood tropospheric weather, the stratosphere was mostly unknown. In addition to AI, Google really did expand the knowledge and science of stratospheric weather.

[bluetwo]

I thought this project was pretty impressive. I feel like this is a thing that is going to come back around once costs come down and a killer app is found for it.

[galoisscobi]

Balloon retrieval might be a problem that would have to be solved while keeping operation costs low.

I knew some friends over at Loon and one of their challenges was it wasn’t highly deterministic where the balloon would land at the end of life, and they had a rescue team with speedboats, helicopters and land rovers to go recover balloons. They could pick a big enough radius and have it land somewhere within that to avoid cities, and human settlements.

Also, Alphabet burned considerable money on this for 9 years before shutting down. Not sure if it’ll come back, at least not by Alphabet.