3 ms·

Loon didn't supply the balloons, they just have a shared supplier.

• zaroth 7y ago
  That’s not usually how these supplier partnerships work. Loon needed a balloon which was probably not available off the shelf. They paid a certain amount of money to get someone to build balloons to their specification which probably involved a great deal of R&D, manufacturing tooling, real world testing, etc. Because Google didn’t develop the technology in-house, and perhaps as a consequence of how the contract was written, we cannot say how much of the technology developed for Loon could have ended up here, and if or whether Loon should have paid more for exclusivity or restrictions on how that R&D could be used, or if in fact Loon paid a lot less specifically because the supplier was able to defray development costs through expected future military applications. Or maybe the tech really was off the shelf and destined for military use and Loon just happened to use the same thing for their own Good Samaritan project. However, several of Google’s balloons crashed to Earth so it’s a pretty good bet that they were paying for prototypes and significant R&D was going into the balloons.