A year and five months ago, Google’s Project Loon kicked off and began launching massive balloons into the sky that would provide internet access to even the most remote regions around the world. After travelling over three million kilometres into the stratosphere, the next phase of Project Loon has seen Google making more balloons that can stay afloat longer.
The search company outlined the next phase of its project over in a Google+ post here.
The past year has been a learning curve for the Project Loon team, they explain in the post, which is why it’s had to explore new ways to improve on its delivery and make it as efficient as possible.
The Project Loon team has been hard at work improving on simple things such as providing fluffier socks to ensure the least amount of friction for team members when building the balloons, to bigger changes such as refining the manufacturing process to make the balloons last 10 times longer in the stratosphere and developing autofill equipment that will fill ballons faster, enabling Google to launch up to 20 balloons per day.
“As we’ve launched more long-lasting balloons in the stratosphere we’ve needed to ensure that we can accurately maneuver them to where they need to go,” Google adds. “By constantly computing thousands of trajectory simulations it turns out we can get pretty close to our targets. This is great for getting our balloons to where users need them, and great for getting balloons to our recovery zones at the end of their lifetime to make our recovery team’s job that much easier.”
“We’ve learned a great deal about what it will take to bring the Internet to everyone, no matter where they are…What a difference 3 million kilometres make; here’s to many more!” the search engine says.
Yesterday, it was revealed that one of the Loon balloons had apparently crashed in the Free State when a farmer discovered debris in his field. The firm has, however, also recently signed up Australian network operator Telstra to begin further testing of internet signals from 20KM up.
[Image – Project Loon]
