When we last checked in on circumnavigated the globe in a very quick 22 days. I just attended a talk at Google I/O and got some more info about some of the challenges the team faces in making this wild-arse project happen.
First off, if you need a refresher on what Project Loon is, here ya go. You should er, anyway. Nothing about this stuff looks remotely easy.
They also understand that shit happens. As anyone who has planned a camping trip knows, weather doesn’t always line up with the predictions. There’s wind-noise and other complications. So they have other programs that run contingency calculations to help them estimate where balloons will end up. They used advanced simulations to help them do this, like the one you see above. You can try a lot of different things in sim pretty easily. Moving thousands of balloons around the globe, not so much.
All this adds up to a program that’s knocking off some pretty major achievements. Not only did a Loon balloon manage that trip around the globe 11 days faster than was predicted, but another balloon managed to land within 500 metres of its targeted landing spot after an extremely long 20,000km flight. A balloon did that with no propulsion — just rising and falling to ride the different wind currents. Pretty amazing.
The Project Loon team acknowledged that they still have a long way to go before they’re able to make uninterrupted internet access available to every human on the planet, but it’s incredible how far they have come in just a couple years. Hopefully they will continue ramping things up, and the hilarious UFO scares will continue in perpetuity. [Project Loon]