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Google's Project Loon Can Now Launch Up To 20 Balloons Per Day, Fly 10x Longer
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.
frist loony sist eleventyone.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
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?
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
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...
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
you would think helium to be a tad more expensive then if it is in fact as you in shortage right now.
though, what do they fill these with? surely just not air, the blurb is all kinds of stupid. I think the engineering problem with filling it is more akin to cutting the feed at the right point more than anything to not rupture the vessel that is being filled. just filling a thing with air in 5 minutes on it's own isn't that impressive, since you can fill emergency exit slides etc far, far faster than that.
more than that, it's more of a problem of moving the thing to the different deployment points than anything else- unless they aim to launch the balloons at the same place. always thought that the fucking filling of the balloons to be the easiest part and the networking behind it, powering the node while it is in the air etc to be the hard part- that, and well, the general longevity of such a system, like, will this deploy before mobile networks to such far reaches? you can make pretty big cells with 450 and 900mhz.
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
Ignore TFA, because TFA is an idiot. They are, in fact, filled with helium.
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
If so, the only difference is that instead of non-renewable Helium they spend non-renewable natural gas.
And they also spend non-renewable energy and minerals to produce the energy sources, be it PV cells or Li-Ion batteries, and the radio itself.
The towers strategically located on the ground would do the same without any need to seed the globe with balloons.
Is this project real, or just a sly attempt by Google to corner the market for helium?
Natural gas is constantly formed in biological processes. Also, it can be synthesized. Helium can only be mined.
I think the engineering problem with filling it is more akin to cutting the feed at the right point more than anything to not rupture the vessel that is being filled.
Not really a problem. They likely just release a set volume of gas at a given temperature.
another reason to get cracking on that fusion energy project eh comrade?
Mod me down, my New Earth Global Warmingist friends!
Or, maybe less challenging, they could try to fill the balloons with hydrogen.
While the medical equipment is one use of helium, it has nothing to do with why there's a shortage. This sums up the situation, including new facilities coming online that pretty much will make the "ermegerd heliumz" you've spewed a moot point. http://www.decodedscience.com/...
There is also many references talking about hot air balloons for the Loon project. This is pretty confusing. It seems in its early phase the project used helium. Someone can provide an authoritative answer and reference about this project? Wikipedia doesn't fit the bill. It refers to an article for the helium thing, however you can also find many ones on tech magazines refering to hot air.
Achille Talon
Hop!
It's almost as though Slashdot is trying to lure me out to the front page, or something, by not showing responses to the JE messages.
Get thee glass eyes, and, like a scurvy politician, seem to see things thou dost not.--King Lear
Why isn't there a "-1, oh the humanity!" mod?
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Why would you need ? To hide the facts ?
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.
One more thing which advocate in favor of an hot air filled balloon is the altitude control system which pump in and out AIR, not helium since there is none available to pump in. Since this mechanism is used to navigate using high altitude winds if helium would be required it wouldn't last 100 days beside the fact pumping air would not change the altitude. The only reference I have found about helium on the Loon site is about the leak tests. They use helium to test the envelope for leaks.
Achille Talon
Hop!
The new facilities only provide helium as long as the gas fields last, which is most likely measured in decades.
That's why the SI system has prefixes, like tera.
Your post contains 377 characters. Once properly marked-up in HTML, it requires 431 bytes (3448 bits).
Get free satoshi (Bitcoin) and Dogecoins
We're talking about low-cost unmanned balloons, so why not use hydrogen? H2 does not have as major a leakage problem as does He, with its tiny atoms.
Now who was the genius who came up with that name?
...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.
I am very small, utmostly microscopic.
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?
Just use a very large laser pointer. ;-)
Ezekiel 23:20
Surely we should only be using helium in a reusable way.
That's why they are using plutonium-239 in a micro-reactor to generate heat to keep the balloons aloft.
"A person is smart. People are dumb, panicky dangerous animals and you know it." - K
A hot air balloon would not last 100 days, it would run out of fuel to heat the air before that. Pumping air in/out of the balloon is a standard way that airships change buoyancy, by having a smaller balloon inside the bigger one that you fill with normal air to reduce the volume of the helium (and that increases the density, thereby reducing lift).
I'm pretty sure this is all just full of hot air.
// file: mice.h
#include "frickin_lasers.h"
They should use hydrogen for the actual flights. Being 2 atoms of H, instead of a monatomic atom of He, the balloon will leak far less over time, and there's no danger of running out of H.
As long as the envelope doesn't leak, there's no real danger of explosion. Even the Hindenberg didn't explode - it just burned.
"Transparent" is a shit show that trades on every stereotype going. A man in drag is NOT a transsexual.
I wonder how long until the balloons also carry stingrays
helium is usually with natural gas; most helium right now is just vented right to the atmosphere, there is no real shortage on planet earth just wasting.
There's this thing called history, which you're apparently doomed to repeat.
Il n'y a pas de Planet B.
Is that an American, Canadian, or Aussie Rules football field?
Il n'y a pas de Planet B.
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 people so they can get patched. Microsoft has more money than the US Federal government, or it appears that way....
Your Average Joe
One would assume that these aren't going to have passengers or crew. If it blows up at altitude, the whole balloon should combust, producing harmless water. I am sure with modern safety precautions even the recovery could be automated to ensure that no human life is even endangered. Even the Hindenburg wasn't that great in terms of actual loss of life.
Zero to 0,1,2,3 dp...
This is from an article linked from Wikipedia:
The X’ers also formed a partnership with Raven Aerostar, a company whose balloons have included early NASA near-space probes. Together they confronted problems involving flight duration, control, and power consumption that have baffled balloonists for centuries. Ultimately they came up with a dual-chamber design (one filled with helium, the other with air) and a system of valves that allowed low-energy altitude adjustments. “Ballooning is way harder than rocket science,” DeVaul says.
To make the envelope, Raven Aerostar extrudes a special polyethylene film, only three times the thickness of the plastic that covers your typical loaf of bread and specially formulated to retain helium, resist pressure, and stay supple, even at –50 degrees Fahrenheit. The company now runs an assembly line for Google in Sulphur Springs, Texas, and it set up a second line near its headquarters in Sioux Falls, South Dakota. After all, if you’re going to encircle the globe with Internet-beaming UFOs, you’re going to need a lot of them.
So, it's helium and air, which probably caused some of the confusion.
Irony: Agile development has too much intertia to be abandoned now.
Wouldn't it be possible to get some helium from Jupiter ?
Try the Sun. It makes loads of it and it's nearer too. Bring some back for me.
Gees, hot air, helium, what difference does it make, why would you even bother with ballons. Harsh reality is if a country is too stupid to get it's fibre optic broadband push together than it deserves to slowly but surely get relegated to second world status for blind ignorance driven by nothing but psychopathic greed. Those first world countries that are still struggling with fibre to the premise have first world fuck wits in government being fed money in off shore tax havens by corrupt main stream media and telecom incumbents and they are kept in power by the cheetos brigade for whom the internet is nothing but a new source of commercials and being told what to buy and when to buy it in order to be happy and 'sic' a better person when you can pose around with all the shit you have bought.
Chaos - everything, everywhere, everywhen
Classically, containing hydrogen gas is a worse leakage problem than helium, but this is primarily due to the other properties like flammability and metal embrittlement.
Strictly considering leakage rates, Graham's law of effusion says that the rate of effusion is inversely proportional to the square rate of the molecular weights. So H2 leaks faster than He by a factor of about 1.414. Graham's law is of course an approximation as it ignores that molecular size is not strictly proportional to molecular weight, but it should be quite accurate when molecular sizes of the gas are considerably less than the holes in the container.
Given that He is very much smaller then H2, I would expect somewhat less difference in effusion rates than than predicted by Graham's law, though this may not be measurable as far as I know.
But for unmanned operation, I don't know why Google would not use H2. H2 is much cheaper and can be easily made on site with little technology.
Theoretically, pure He has 93% the lifting capacity of H2 -- but your lifting gas is never pure and structural elements such as the balloon and frame have the same amount of dead weight in either case. So, in terms of payload, H2 is significantly better then He.
A very nice article on lift comparison. points out that the Hindenburg design would simply not work using He as the lifting gas due to the "small difference" in buoyancy of the 2 gases.
Umm.
Coast to coast in america you are looking at a little over 2000 miles. You expect full fiber coverage over a landmass that even Mc Donalds can't spread their brand over. Note the big bubbles - that's one store serving a gigantic area
http://all-that-is-interesting...
In the midwest - Illinois, there are still areas that can't get dsl - let alone cable. They are restricted to speeds of 56k or less - some resort to satellite with the FUP hobble.
Fiber is going to take many years to roll out in populous states, let alone the states like Nevada or Idaho. We're a bit larger and less populated than countries in europe per capita.
So, Google is wrongly going after floating balloons since it's going to be incredibly expensive to fiber all of the united states. Unfortunately, google is going to continue to cause harm since they sold out.
_ _ _ Go for the eyes Boo! GO FOR THE EYES!
Gas fields don't completely stop producing. They become uneconomic. The gas they produce doesn't cover the operation cost and they are capped.
If helium was rare and expensive the helium rich capped fields would be opened up again.
That said, for markets to work price must be set on the market. The current system of selling helium at a fixed price has got to change, if only to incentivise helium capture.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
the second most abundant element in the universe is not a "finite resource"
you are being silly with that alarmist nonsense about superconductors, we already have had superconductors at liquid nitrogen temperatures for 30 years
Use k/G/T/E/... for SI and ki/Gi/Ti/Ei... for IEC. Peopls not following standards have no business expecting that anybody understands what they are talking about. Really, do not blame your cluelessness on me, blame it on yourself.
You are of course right about the useless units, like miles, gallons, stones, etc.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
They are also a fail on a different level: Rubber balloons hold air under far higher pressure than hot-air balloons, so these are not even comparable if the volume aof a party balloon was somehow a defined quantity.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
Yeah, I know, so many areas in the US don't have electricity, plumbing, roads, stormwater systems, and all of them individually are vastly more expensive than wiring up fibreoptic (let alone combined), wait, WHAT!? So many US business have got to be run by idiots, I mean, literally hundreds of thousands of owners and managers who a stupid enough to accept lies so they can be ripped off with hugely inflated communications costs, and all the future communications monitored and their communications strangled if they compete against subsidiaries or companies owned by major ISP management, SUCKERS.
Chaos - everything, everywhere, everywhen
Which Aussie Rules football field? They're all different sizes.
I hereby disqualify grim-one on strong suspicion of being Aussie. ;)
Il n'y a pas de Planet B.