10 ms·

A lot of people don't realize that a relatively simple balloon can be designed to take off from anywhere in the world, reach any other point in the world, and h

A lot of people don't realize that a relatively simple balloon can be designed to take off from anywhere in the world, reach any other point in the world, and hover for multiple days sending back data with very little deviation. All the balloon needs is a way to change its altitude, that's it, it doesn't need any actuators to move in horizontal direction. Google's project Loon (https://x.company/projects/loon/ https://x.company/projects/loon/) did this and I thought it was pretty darn cool. The way it works is this: different layers of stratosphere have different wind directions. If you can accurately predict the wind directions in different layers, you can in theory move in horizontal direction just by changing your altitude. Loon had pretty good models and simulated the wind directions well. Their balloon used to take off from Nevada and reach Kenya (I believe) and hover there for multiple days to provide comms. They use a cool reinforcement learning based controller in their loop: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-020-2939-8 https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-020-2939-8 I remember some Chinese researchers writing papers on this topic back then and them saying they'd have good results if they had access to data from Loon: https://www.nature.com/articles/srep45976 https://www.nature.com/articles/srep45976 I don't think Loon ever shared any data publicly (I was wrong, they did apparently open source a ton of data) but Loon did get shut down (like a lot of other Alphabet's moonshots) and I remember some of their tech and patents were sold to SoftBank and others. I was surprised US did not try to stop this in the interest of national security.

atoav 4y ago
Reminds me of this absolute stunning film about the japanese war balloons from WWII: https://archive.org/details/gov.archives.arc.13084 https://archive.org/details/gov.archives.arc.13084
deepzn 4y ago
This is such an uncanny representation of an episode of Space Force it's hilarious.
cma 4y ago
Do unallied countries respect patents for military hardware?
- mytailorisrich 4y ago
  No-one respects patents for military purposes. That's why important stuff is kept secret.
- lobocinza 4y ago
  Many Chinese equipment does look like a copy of Western equipment. I don't think China respect patents at all. And I think even allied countries wouldn't respect patents with military applications if in their interest. e.g. "How Turkey Defied the U.S. and Became a Killer Drone Power" https://theintercept.com/2019/05/14/turkey-second-drone-age/ https://theintercept.com/2019/05/14/turkey-second-drone-age/
- alsodumb 4y ago
  Probably not, but also my personal experience says that you can't really replicate things just always from the patent. There's always some secret sauce to get things to work. The question is what exactly did Loon sell when they shut down and where did most of the people working on it end up? I know some folks at Loon and they went back to either Google Brain or some other moonshots in Google or Google Research but a lot of people didn't do that.
  - c_o_n_v_e_x 4y ago
    If you need secret sauce to get things to work, you can have the patent invalidated.
    - JPLeRouzic 4y ago
      Tell that to the pharmaceutical industry. Many pharmaceutical patents can't be reproduced without insider knowledge as discovered companies that entered the "generic" business. https://dlj.law.duke.edu/article/patent-laws-reproducibility-paradox-sherkow-vol66-iss4/ https://dlj.law.duke.edu/article/patent-laws-reproducibility...
    - AlbertCory 4y ago
      You're very wrong about that. What you're talking about is called a 112 rejection. Section 112 has to do with "written description," "enablement," and "best mode." Getting a patent invalidated after it's issued can't be done on 112 grounds. It's done based on anticipation and obviousness (prior art, basically).
rasz 4y ago
>some of their tech and patents were sold to SoftBank Loon was shut down because Google stole the tech. "In February of 2008, Google founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page visited Space Data’s headquarters with as many as 10 other Google executives in tow" https://www.wired.com/story/the-lawsuit-that-could-pop-alphabets-project-loon-balloons/ https://www.wired.com/story/the-lawsuit-that-could-pop-alpha... https://9to5google.com/2017/07/10/project-loon-patents/ https://9to5google.com/2017/07/10/project-loon-patents/ https://www.law.com/therecorder/2019/07/29/google-settles-ip-case-over-high-altitude-balloons/ https://www.law.com/therecorder/2019/07/29/google-settles-ip...
- alsodumb 4y ago
  I know people who worked at Loon. It certainly wasn't shut down because of the lawsuit. It was pretty much because of X's move fast approach and they didn't think Loon would make money anytime soon. They killed another one of my favorite projects for same reasons: https://x.company/projects/makani/ https://x.company/projects/makani/
  - walrus01 4y ago
    From the point of view of somebody who works in residential last mile internet service loon was always a pipe dream, because you'd need a truly absurd number of them to provide persistent packet-loss-free 24x7x365 coverage over a USA county sized area. Paying customers won't tolerate situations like "oh sorry the balloon has drifted away with the upper atmosphere winds, wait a few hours for maybe another one to be back in our region". With various ground based data relays for aggregating traffic coming from the PtMP balloon-to-cpe radio links. With advances in 600/700 MHz (and 2500 MHz band) based 3GPP rev-whatever tech for LTE-based last mile that can punch through trees, and starlink (and hopefully someday some viable non-spacex competitors for starlink), and other terrestrial WISP stuff, the need for something like loon is greatly decreased.
    - alsodumb 4y ago
      Yeah it didn't make a lot of sense in most of continental United States and maybe that's why most of Loon's initial deployment testing was in Africa with sparser terrestrial network. Starlink definitely changed the rules and made LEO based systems a viable alternative for sure.
acomjean 4y ago
This is what makes the Albuquerque ballon festival kind of unique (they call it the box). Balloons take off fly away, change altitude and fly back to land in almost the same place. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albuquerque_International_Balloon_Fiesta#Albuquerque_box https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albuquerque_International_Ball... https://www.krqe.com/news/balloon-fiesta/local-pilot-explains-albuquerque-box-phenomenon/ https://www.krqe.com/news/balloon-fiesta/local-pilot-explain... Except the day I went, which is something.. Still quite the sight.
- dylan604 4y ago
  well, you almost got it. you forgot the part where the fly past for a distance so that when they start to lower altitude, it brings them back to the start. what you describe doesn't really make a box
  - hgsgm 4y ago
    What is "the fly past for a distance"?
    - ianai 4y ago
      IIRC it’s related to the nearby mountains. Fly up, pushed towards mountains, go lower, pushed back towards the river/valley were launched. I feel for other people who didn’t get to grow up seeing those balloons every year on their way to school or random times. NM also has the “original burning man” https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zozobra https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zozobra.
    - dylan604 4y ago
      Just to put numbers on it for example…Say they travel 1 mile down range where they then rise in altitude. Now, they float back 2 miles before lowering altitude to travel back 1 mile to where they started. They fly past for a 1 mile distance in this example
Buttons840 4y ago
The balloon controls its own movement using only itself (and GPS) as a data source, right? Like, it's not receiving radio instructions from the ground?
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
claytongulick 4y ago
Project loon was super cool. It's a shame that Richard DeVaul got caught up in a political moment and a pearl clutching media that was eager to misrepresent burning man in the most salacious way possible. Richard co-founded loon and is one of the most brilliant people I've ever met. Awful what happened to him. Google's collective IQ dropped precipitously when he left.
- throwawaylinux 4y ago
  Even if the allegations were baseless, it would be hard to mourn someone at Google being set upon by the monster they helped to feed.
- vkou 4y ago
  1. The guy sexually propositioned a woman in an interview. 2. Seriously, do we need more? He's not stupid, he took the same management harassment training as everyone else in the company, he should have known better, he did know better, and he fessed up to it. When you're a director, your reporting chain is not your personal Tinder. Please inform yourself on the subject of illegal sexual harassment in the United States, you'll save yourself and your reports and HR a lot of trouble.
  - claytongulick 4y ago
    Do you have evidence for this? Because I was told a very different story. There's a lot more to it than what you may have read. Perhaps you should consider reserving judgement until you have all the facts. Consider for a moment that there may be important details and nuance that's missed by newspapers that are most interested in clicks. Please inform yourself that accusations are not evidence, and maybe consider what you would feel if you were being judged by accusations alone. I'm not at liberty to discuss the details, but I highly recommend you slow your rush to judgement. There's a lot about the whole situation that you are not aware of.
  - Manuel_D 4y ago
    The offending interaction occurred after the interview at burning man. He did not sexually proposition anyone in the interview. Furthermore the allegations were made two years after the supposed incidents occurred, the more distant an event is in our memory the more I'm inclined to give the benefit of the doubt to the possibility of people's accounts drifting from the truth. The issue is whether Simpson was denied before or after burning man. If it was before, which is apparently what Devaul was insisting, it really was inappropriate to take any action in my opinion. If you match on tinder with someone you once interviewed, after the hire/no hurry decision is made, then your company shouldn't be treating this relationship any different from a total stranger. Or are we supposed to keep spreadsheets of every person we ever interviewed? Because that's not in my sexual harassment training, I dunno about yours. Think about how you would defend yourself if someone accused you of making a sexual advance in an interview after you rejected them for a job? If testimony alone is enough to get you fired, then that's a significant source of pressure to give female candidates positive outcomes even if their performance isn't up to par.
1letterunixname 4y ago
The problem with Loon was that there weren't enough of them, and weather patterns would inevitably cause a clumping of them in certain areas of the world where they would be useless. Tethered balloons at 100k' / 30km would be more useful for comms.
- lovemenot 4y ago
  There's no tether material nearly strong enough to withstand the forces from wind and the tether's own weight and drag at 30km altitude - plus 15km additional length for lateral drift.
  - Nitrolo 4y ago
    There's a concept in engineering called "Reißlänge" (≈ breaking length), which is how long a cable of a certain material can be before it would rip due to its own weight if suspended by one end [0]. The values for some materials are actually much higher than I remembered, with Kevlar reaching ~250 km. From a purely hold-its-own-weight perspective it seems like it might actually be possible! Obviously there's a ton of other problems that wouldn't make it feasible, the first I can think of is the weight of a 50 km tether wouldn't allow the balloon to even take off. I'm sure you can think of another million reasons it wouldn't work. [0]: https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rei%C3%9Fl%C3%A4nge https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rei%C3%9Fl%C3%A4nge
    - lovemenot 4y ago
      That's interesting and surprisingly long for Kevlar. The highest altitude recorded by a single kite is less than 5km. I understand the biggest constraint for higher flights is tether strength-to-weight ratio. Nylon is typically used - fishing line. Tether diameter is another factor as the load from wind, on the tether alone, is considerable over such lengths.
  - 1letterunixname 4y ago
    It's a materials manufacturing to applications and lifecycle problem, not a technical one. Graphene does 50 GPa in bulk. A single atom sheet of it does 10 MPa on its own. Take 75 metric tonnes of cable / space elevator ribbon. That expressed as tensile pressure at an attachment point(s) is conservatively 7.5 GPa over an area about 10 cm^2. With sensible engineering, the entire craft (a very large one) would possess a web of attachment points across its perimeter to distribute forces more-or-less evenly.
barbazoo 4y ago
I think I saw in a museum once that that's how Japan sent over bombs during second world war. They were able to calculate that even back then. It's crazy impressive. Edit: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fu-Go_balloon_bomb https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fu-Go_balloon_bomb
singularity2001 4y ago
This allows "one button steering" as in the game rust

atoav 4y ago

Reminds me of this absolute stunning film about the japanese war balloons from WWII: https://archive.org/details/gov.archives.arc.13084 https://archive.org/details/gov.archives.arc.13084

deepzn 4y ago

This is such an uncanny representation of an episode of Space Force it's hilarious.

cma 4y ago

Do unallied countries respect patents for military hardware?

mytailorisrich 4y ago
No-one respects patents for military purposes. That's why important stuff is kept secret.
lobocinza 4y ago
Many Chinese equipment does look like a copy of Western equipment. I don't think China respect patents at all. And I think even allied countries wouldn't respect patents with military applications if in their interest. e.g. "How Turkey Defied the U.S. and Became a Killer Drone Power" https://theintercept.com/2019/05/14/turkey-second-drone-age/ https://theintercept.com/2019/05/14/turkey-second-drone-age/
alsodumb 4y ago
Probably not, but also my personal experience says that you can't really replicate things just always from the patent. There's always some secret sauce to get things to work. The question is what exactly did Loon sell when they shut down and where did most of the people working on it end up? I know some folks at Loon and they went back to either Google Brain or some other moonshots in Google or Google Research but a lot of people didn't do that.
- c_o_n_v_e_x 4y ago
  If you need secret sauce to get things to work, you can have the patent invalidated.
  - JPLeRouzic 4y ago
    Tell that to the pharmaceutical industry. Many pharmaceutical patents can't be reproduced without insider knowledge as discovered companies that entered the "generic" business. https://dlj.law.duke.edu/article/patent-laws-reproducibility-paradox-sherkow-vol66-iss4/ https://dlj.law.duke.edu/article/patent-laws-reproducibility...
  - AlbertCory 4y ago
    You're very wrong about that. What you're talking about is called a 112 rejection. Section 112 has to do with "written description," "enablement," and "best mode." Getting a patent invalidated after it's issued can't be done on 112 grounds. It's done based on anticipation and obviousness (prior art, basically).

rasz 4y ago

>some of their tech and patents were sold to SoftBank Loon was shut down because Google stole the tech. "In February of 2008, Google founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page visited Space Data’s headquarters with as many as 10 other Google executives in tow" https://www.wired.com/story/the-lawsuit-that-could-pop-alphabets-project-loon-balloons/ https://www.wired.com/story/the-lawsuit-that-could-pop-alpha... https://9to5google.com/2017/07/10/project-loon-patents/ https://9to5google.com/2017/07/10/project-loon-patents/ https://www.law.com/therecorder/2019/07/29/google-settles-ip-case-over-high-altitude-balloons/ https://www.law.com/therecorder/2019/07/29/google-settles-ip...

alsodumb 4y ago
I know people who worked at Loon. It certainly wasn't shut down because of the lawsuit. It was pretty much because of X's move fast approach and they didn't think Loon would make money anytime soon. They killed another one of my favorite projects for same reasons: https://x.company/projects/makani/ https://x.company/projects/makani/
- walrus01 4y ago
  From the point of view of somebody who works in residential last mile internet service loon was always a pipe dream, because you'd need a truly absurd number of them to provide persistent packet-loss-free 24x7x365 coverage over a USA county sized area. Paying customers won't tolerate situations like "oh sorry the balloon has drifted away with the upper atmosphere winds, wait a few hours for maybe another one to be back in our region". With various ground based data relays for aggregating traffic coming from the PtMP balloon-to-cpe radio links. With advances in 600/700 MHz (and 2500 MHz band) based 3GPP rev-whatever tech for LTE-based last mile that can punch through trees, and starlink (and hopefully someday some viable non-spacex competitors for starlink), and other terrestrial WISP stuff, the need for something like loon is greatly decreased.
  - alsodumb 4y ago
    Yeah it didn't make a lot of sense in most of continental United States and maybe that's why most of Loon's initial deployment testing was in Africa with sparser terrestrial network. Starlink definitely changed the rules and made LEO based systems a viable alternative for sure.

acomjean 4y ago

This is what makes the Albuquerque ballon festival kind of unique (they call it the box). Balloons take off fly away, change altitude and fly back to land in almost the same place. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albuquerque_International_Balloon_Fiesta#Albuquerque_box https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albuquerque_International_Ball... https://www.krqe.com/news/balloon-fiesta/local-pilot-explains-albuquerque-box-phenomenon/ https://www.krqe.com/news/balloon-fiesta/local-pilot-explain... Except the day I went, which is something.. Still quite the sight.

dylan604 4y ago
well, you almost got it. you forgot the part where the fly past for a distance so that when they start to lower altitude, it brings them back to the start. what you describe doesn't really make a box
- hgsgm 4y ago
  What is "the fly past for a distance"?
  - ianai 4y ago
    IIRC it’s related to the nearby mountains. Fly up, pushed towards mountains, go lower, pushed back towards the river/valley were launched. I feel for other people who didn’t get to grow up seeing those balloons every year on their way to school or random times. NM also has the “original burning man” https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zozobra https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zozobra.
  - dylan604 4y ago
    Just to put numbers on it for example…Say they travel 1 mile down range where they then rise in altitude. Now, they float back 2 miles before lowering altitude to travel back 1 mile to where they started. They fly past for a 1 mile distance in this example

Buttons840 4y ago

The balloon controls its own movement using only itself (and GPS) as a data source, right? Like, it's not receiving radio instructions from the ground?

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

claytongulick 4y ago

Project loon was super cool. It's a shame that Richard DeVaul got caught up in a political moment and a pearl clutching media that was eager to misrepresent burning man in the most salacious way possible. Richard co-founded loon and is one of the most brilliant people I've ever met. Awful what happened to him. Google's collective IQ dropped precipitously when he left.

throwawaylinux 4y ago
Even if the allegations were baseless, it would be hard to mourn someone at Google being set upon by the monster they helped to feed.
vkou 4y ago
1. The guy sexually propositioned a woman in an interview. 2. Seriously, do we need more? He's not stupid, he took the same management harassment training as everyone else in the company, he should have known better, he did know better, and he fessed up to it. When you're a director, your reporting chain is not your personal Tinder. Please inform yourself on the subject of illegal sexual harassment in the United States, you'll save yourself and your reports and HR a lot of trouble.
- claytongulick 4y ago
  Do you have evidence for this? Because I was told a very different story. There's a lot more to it than what you may have read. Perhaps you should consider reserving judgement until you have all the facts. Consider for a moment that there may be important details and nuance that's missed by newspapers that are most interested in clicks. Please inform yourself that accusations are not evidence, and maybe consider what you would feel if you were being judged by accusations alone. I'm not at liberty to discuss the details, but I highly recommend you slow your rush to judgement. There's a lot about the whole situation that you are not aware of.
- Manuel_D 4y ago
  The offending interaction occurred after the interview at burning man. He did not sexually proposition anyone in the interview. Furthermore the allegations were made two years after the supposed incidents occurred, the more distant an event is in our memory the more I'm inclined to give the benefit of the doubt to the possibility of people's accounts drifting from the truth. The issue is whether Simpson was denied before or after burning man. If it was before, which is apparently what Devaul was insisting, it really was inappropriate to take any action in my opinion. If you match on tinder with someone you once interviewed, after the hire/no hurry decision is made, then your company shouldn't be treating this relationship any different from a total stranger. Or are we supposed to keep spreadsheets of every person we ever interviewed? Because that's not in my sexual harassment training, I dunno about yours. Think about how you would defend yourself if someone accused you of making a sexual advance in an interview after you rejected them for a job? If testimony alone is enough to get you fired, then that's a significant source of pressure to give female candidates positive outcomes even if their performance isn't up to par.

1letterunixname 4y ago

The problem with Loon was that there weren't enough of them, and weather patterns would inevitably cause a clumping of them in certain areas of the world where they would be useless. Tethered balloons at 100k' / 30km would be more useful for comms.

lovemenot 4y ago
There's no tether material nearly strong enough to withstand the forces from wind and the tether's own weight and drag at 30km altitude - plus 15km additional length for lateral drift.
- Nitrolo 4y ago
  There's a concept in engineering called "Reißlänge" (≈ breaking length), which is how long a cable of a certain material can be before it would rip due to its own weight if suspended by one end [0]. The values for some materials are actually much higher than I remembered, with Kevlar reaching ~250 km. From a purely hold-its-own-weight perspective it seems like it might actually be possible! Obviously there's a ton of other problems that wouldn't make it feasible, the first I can think of is the weight of a 50 km tether wouldn't allow the balloon to even take off. I'm sure you can think of another million reasons it wouldn't work. [0]: https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rei%C3%9Fl%C3%A4nge https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rei%C3%9Fl%C3%A4nge
  - lovemenot 4y ago
    That's interesting and surprisingly long for Kevlar. The highest altitude recorded by a single kite is less than 5km. I understand the biggest constraint for higher flights is tether strength-to-weight ratio. Nylon is typically used - fishing line. Tether diameter is another factor as the load from wind, on the tether alone, is considerable over such lengths.
- 1letterunixname 4y ago
  It's a materials manufacturing to applications and lifecycle problem, not a technical one. Graphene does 50 GPa in bulk. A single atom sheet of it does 10 MPa on its own. Take 75 metric tonnes of cable / space elevator ribbon. That expressed as tensile pressure at an attachment point(s) is conservatively 7.5 GPa over an area about 10 cm^2. With sensible engineering, the entire craft (a very large one) would possess a web of attachment points across its perimeter to distribute forces more-or-less evenly.

barbazoo 4y ago

I think I saw in a museum once that that's how Japan sent over bombs during second world war. They were able to calculate that even back then. It's crazy impressive. Edit: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fu-Go_balloon_bomb https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fu-Go_balloon_bomb

singularity2001 4y ago

This allows "one button steering" as in the game rust