Slashdot Mirror
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.
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...
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.