Google's Project Loon Can Now Launch Up To 20 Balloons Per Day, Fly 10x Longer 116
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.
loony (Score:2)
frist loony sist eleventyone.
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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.
mo
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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.
Not really a problem. They likely just release a set volume of gas at a given temperature.
What's the deal with the message notifications? (Score:1)
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Ignore TFA, because TFA is an idiot. They are, in fact, filled with helium [wikipedia.org].
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This is from an article linked from Wikipedia [wired.com]:
The X’ers also formed a partnership with Raven Aerostar, a company whose balloons have included early NASA near-space probes. Together they confronted problems involving flight duration, control, and power consumption that have baffled balloonists for centuries. Ultimately they came up with a dual-chamber design (one filled with helium, the other with air) and a system of valves that allowed low-energy altitude adjustments. “Ballooning is way harder than rocket science,” DeVaul says.
To make the envelope, Raven Aerostar extrudes a special polyethylene film, only three times the thickness of the plastic that covers your typical loaf of bread and specially formulated to retain helium, resist pressure, and stay supple, even at –50 degrees Fahrenheit. The company now runs an assembly line for Google in Sulphur Springs, Texas, and it set up a second line near its headquarters in Sioux Falls, South Dakota. After all, if you’re going to encircle the globe with Internet-beaming UFOs, you’re going to need a lot of them.
So, it's helium and air, which probably caused some of the confusion.
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Gees, hot air, helium, what difference does it make, why would you even bother with ballons. Harsh reality is if a country is too stupid to get it's fibre optic broadband push together than it deserves to slowly but surely get relegated to second world status for blind ignorance driven by nothing but psychopathic greed. Those first world countries that are still struggling with fibre to the premise have first world fuck wits in government being fed money in off shore tax havens by corrupt main stream media
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Umm.
Coast to coast in america you are looking at a little over 2000 miles. You expect full fiber coverage over a landmass that even Mc Donalds can't spread their brand over. Note the big bubbles - that's one store serving a gigantic area
http://all-that-is-interesting... [all-that-i...esting.com]
In the midwest - Illinois, there are still areas that can't get dsl - let alone cable. They are restricted to speeds of 56k or less - some resort to satellite with the FUP hobble.
Fiber is going to take many years to roll out in populous state
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Yeah, I know, so many areas in the US don't have electricity, plumbing, roads, stormwater systems, and all of them individually are vastly more expensive than wiring up fibreoptic (let alone combined), wait, WHAT!? So many US business have got to be run by idiots, I mean, literally hundreds of thousands of owners and managers who a stupid enough to accept lies so they can be ripped off with hugely inflated communications costs, and all the future communications monitored and their communications strangled
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They should use hydrogen for the actual flights. Being 2 atoms of H, instead of a monatomic atom of He, the balloon will leak far less over time, and there's no danger of running out of H.
As long as the envelope doesn't leak, there's no real danger of explosion. Even the Hindenberg didn't explode - it just burned.
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If so, the only difference is that instead of non-renewable Helium they spend non-renewable natural gas.
And they also spend non-renewable energy and minerals to produce the energy sources, be it PV cells or Li-Ion batteries, and the radio itself.
The towers strategically located on the ground would do the same without any need to seed the globe with balloons.
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another reason to get cracking on that fusion energy project eh comrade?
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Why isn't there a "-1, oh the humanity!" mod?
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There's this thing called history [wikipedia.org], which you're apparently doomed to repeat.
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helium is usually with natural gas; most helium right now is just vented right to the atmosphere, there is no real shortage on planet earth just wasting.
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the second most abundant element in the universe is not a "finite resource"
you are being silly with that alarmist nonsense about superconductors, we already have had superconductors at liquid nitrogen temperatures for 30 years
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Gas fields don't completely stop producing. They become uneconomic. The gas they produce doesn't cover the operation cost and they are capped.
If helium was rare and expensive the helium rich capped fields would be opened up again.
That said, for markets to work price must be set on the market. The current system of selling helium at a fixed price has got to change, if only to incentivise helium capture.
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We're talking about low-cost unmanned balloons, so why not use hydrogen? H2 does not have as major a leakage problem as does He, with its tiny atoms.
Now who was the genius who came up with that name?
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Classically, containing hydrogen gas is a worse leakage problem than helium, but this is primarily due to the other properties like flammability and metal embrittlement.
Strictly considering leakage rates, Graham's law of effusion [wikipedia.org] says that the rate of effusion is inversely proportional to the square rate of the molecular weights. So H2 leaks faster than He by a factor of about 1.414. Graham's law is of course an approximation as it ignores that molecular size is not strictly proportional to molecular weight
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Environmental impact (Score:2)
Are we being utterly stupid now? Party balloons? (Score:2)
What happened to actual units like cubic-meters? Too difficult for slashdot? Or is the number to small and just shows that "Google engineering" is not nearly as impressive as some people want it to look?
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Is that an American, Canadian, or Aussie Rules football field?
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I hereby disqualify grim-one on strong suspicion of being Aussie. ;)
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Your post contains 377 characters. Once properly marked-up in HTML, it requires 431 bytes (3448 bits).
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Use k/G/T/E/... for SI and ki/Gi/Ti/Ei... for IEC. Peopls not following standards have no business expecting that anybody understands what they are talking about. Really, do not blame your cluelessness on me, blame it on yourself.
You are of course right about the useless units, like miles, gallons, stones, etc.
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They are also a fail on a different level: Rubber balloons hold air under far higher pressure than hot-air balloons, so these are not even comparable if the volume aof a party balloon was somehow a defined quantity.
No hot air (Score:4, Informative)
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... [google.com]
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The fleet of solar powered drones is at least controllable. Which does mean that the drone would actively keep it's position and have no need to be retrieved in some inhospitable terrain with "STOY! STRELYAYUT!" signs after descent.
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it is not "hard to mine", right now most of it is just vented at natural gas sites. the only "shortage" is due to waste and stupidity. Even after the last natural gas field stops giving helium it can just be recovered from atmosphere at greater cost. We'll thus never run out for millenia
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it can just be recovered from atmosphere
Most of it escapes into space. It's gone. You can make some more by fusing hydrogen atoms.
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or as a byproduct of fission, that's the source of most Helium on Earth (alpha particles are Helium nuclei).
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you are confused, there is helium in the atmosphere which can be recovered by liquifiying, the escape and loss of that will be over geological time scales
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Why do you say they are not hot air balloons? The article is pretty clear they are. You quote do not say otherwise.
Just because it's on the internet doesn't make it correct.
The pictures in the TFA are not of hot air balloons. They are of helium balloons. And engineering wise, no hot air balloon in capable of the stats that google is claiming.
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This is not the only article talking about hot air filled balloons. The text is talking about hot air, not matter what the picture is. Even the Loon project web site is not clear about this.
Yet somehow the Wikipedia site happily identifies the balloons as being He filled [wikipedia.org]
Whoever wrote the text that everyone else is quoting screwed up big time, and is totally wrong about these balloons being hot air based. As I stated before, the photos are of classic Helium balloons, and no hot air balloon can do what google is claiming - that is basic physics.
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Maybe they are intentionally obscure about He to let us think it is air filled or filled with another gas.
Ah .. I see you going the way of a conspiracy theory in order to avoid accepting common sense. Occams razor be damned!
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Given that they strapped a parachute on these things in case they descend too quickly, it's a safe assumption that they want to reuse these balloons as much as possible, so hydrogen is not an option
They won't be re-using the envelopes - the "balloon part", so it's perfectly fine to use hydrogen. The smart thing would be to drop the instrument package and then burn the envelope (it's plastic film) so that it doesn't result in a damage claim because you smothered someone's cow, or that the balloon fell on a roadway and distracts motorists, some who die in the ensuing accidents. It also makes it more predictable where the instrument package will land
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The smart thing would be to drop the instrument package and then burn the envelope
The envelope is made of polyethylene, I wonder if it's chlorinated. in that case, dioxin. also, it's not particularly biodegradable, so you need complete combustion even if it were safe to burn
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Try some critical thinking
But critical thinking is hard.
And so is taking a step back and re-thinking when multiple people say something is not being correctly reported.
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The only reference to helium is for leak detection tests.
Because you can measure hot air balloon leaks by looking for helium?
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This text does not tell what the balloon is inflated with
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This text does not tell what the balloon is inflated with
Maybe hype?
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Google Priority these days? (Score:1)
filling it with enough *air* (Score:2)
You can fill it with as much air as you want, and it wont fly.
And that is not what the google statement says
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Maybe Google is recycling politicians into Loon pilots/air heaters combo.
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If you fill it with pure nitrogen, the majority component of air, it should be possible to get some buoyancy out of it and still have a tenuous justification for calling it air. The balloons would have to be pretty enormous, though.
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No, calling Nitrogen Air is as justified as calling Helium Air.
Colloquially air is something you can breathe without dying.
Technically air is well defined as a mixture of gases.
Re: balloon vs drones (Score:2)
Hail our new helium overlords (Score:2)
Is this project real, or just a sly attempt by Google to corner the market for helium?
Helium shortage, US govt effed-up (Score:2)
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I doubt the Arab nations are as freaked out about depleting their oil as we are about depleting our helium.
This kind of reminds me about a time at work where we had 20 terabytes on a SAN, most of which was unused. One of my projects was using about 300 GB on the SAN and IT was freaking out about it. "The storage costs $10,000 per terabyte!". My thinking is that it costs $10,000 per terabyte to leave it sitting ther
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Yes, the government fsck'd up the helium market, but for applications like this it isn't that big of a deal. You can use hydrogen instead, although the flight time will likely be half due to leaks. For a while there was a good bit of research into using hydrogen as a deep diving gas in place of helium, but pesky safety issues got in the way.
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Most helium from the earth is just vented right now, the "shortage" is artificial. And it can be recovered from atmosphere just at greater cost than from venting at natural gas sites, which in the future will be how it is "mined". We'll never run out on any timescale that matters, the loss to outer space is only concern over geological time spans. Only economic "shortage", not material one.
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We'll never run out on any timescale that matters, the loss to outer space is only concern over geological time spans.
NOTHING is a concern over geological time periods! The Sun will eventually swallow the Earth- but nobody seems to care too much. Helium depletion on Earth will be a blip on a geological time scale, but during that blip helium will be just a memory to several thousand generations.
Helium is for sissies anyway. I don't care if Donal
You ever wonder... (Score:2)
...why cat food cans generally have pop-tops, but tuna fish cans generally don't?
Project Loon strikes me this way: they are missing something obvious.
Is this a responsible use of Helium? (Score:2)
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Sounds like vaporware (Score:2)
I'm pretty sure this is all just full of hot air.
Police applications (Score:1)
Rural America at 28.8bps... (Score:1)
We cannot get anything faster than 28.8 in the parts of america that is 15 miles from a town. What gives? These people have a copper phone line, power and in some cases natural gas. But no high speed internet. They do not do windows updates or update the browser or plugins until night when the computer can download all night. And they do not have a router so we have a windows machine right on the Internet ready for the latest Windows attacks.
I think Microsoft should pay a LOT to get broadband to those
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Wouldn't it be possible to get some helium from Jupiter ?
Try the Sun. It makes loads of it and it's nearer too. Bring some back for me.