Why Google's Internet Balloon Project Loon Failed (businessinsider.com) 117
Alphabet announced last month that it was winding down Loon, a nine-year-old project and a two-and-a-half-year-old spin off firm, after failing to find a sustainable business model and partners for one of its most prominent moonshot projects. Business Insider shares more details on why the project failed. From the report, which may be paywalled: CEO Alastair Wingarth told The New York Times last year that the team chose Kenya because it was open to adopting new technologies, yet it took two years for Loon to get the project off the ground. Meanwhile, a contract to bring internet to users in Peru remained stuck in a similar regulatory hell. "To get these government sign-offs and actually put our balloons on the stratosphere? That was hard," said one former employee. "That was really hard." Unlocking more airspaces would have also allowed Loon to share balloons between countries. For example, if a balloon in Kenya flew off course, it could be rerouted to Mozambique and used there. Clearing these aerial pathways meant Loon could also deliver its balloons to their destinations efficiently -- surfing any particularly good stratospheric winds that appeared en route.
But as time went on, Loon realized how tough it was to land these agreements. The company tried to get clearance to fly balloons over Venezuela, which would have made it easier to travel to other parts of South America, but the country's authoritarian government would not allow Loon to do so, one former employee said. Some governments were also suspicious of allowing Loon in their airspace. Employees say it was not uncommon for foreign dignitaries to visit Loon's sites and offices to inspect their balloons for surveillance technology. As Loon wrestled with sticky geopolitics, SoftBank's money was fast drying up, and the company spent most of 2020 trying to attract new investment. Loon had some leads, the most promising of which was a new deal with SoftBank for a second cash injection, according to two former employees familiar with the negotiations. The amount Loon hoped to get from the new deal could not be learned, but one said they expected it would have had to be at least $100m to be worth it.
But as time went on, Loon realized how tough it was to land these agreements. The company tried to get clearance to fly balloons over Venezuela, which would have made it easier to travel to other parts of South America, but the country's authoritarian government would not allow Loon to do so, one former employee said. Some governments were also suspicious of allowing Loon in their airspace. Employees say it was not uncommon for foreign dignitaries to visit Loon's sites and offices to inspect their balloons for surveillance technology. As Loon wrestled with sticky geopolitics, SoftBank's money was fast drying up, and the company spent most of 2020 trying to attract new investment. Loon had some leads, the most promising of which was a new deal with SoftBank for a second cash injection, according to two former employees familiar with the negotiations. The amount Loon hoped to get from the new deal could not be learned, but one said they expected it would have had to be at least $100m to be worth it.
crazy as it sounded (Score:5, Interesting)
Design Decisions (Score:4, Insightful)
For example, let’s start with the decision to use the combination of free-flying balloons at high altitude. Loon chose to use free-flying balloons in the stratosphere, roughly twice the altitude of commercial airliners. This gave rise to challenges such as the vagaries of the jet stream at that altitude an where it pushed the balloons... issues with maintenance of the on-board technology... suspicions of nations where the balloons flew, risks to aircraft if the balloons developed faults and descended in to flight paths.
But what if the project had instead used tethered balloons at an altitude of no more than, say, 1500-2000 feet. Except near airports this would be below aircraft flight corridors. It would allow them to be tethered by cables to base stations, making retrieval and maintenance easier. It would also prevent drift, which would remove the geopolitical challenges, since individual balloons would only be stationed where they were welcome.
Let’s not kid ourselves: Alphabet and Google hire really, really smart people, It’s inconceivable that someone from the project would not have suggested this or that it would not have been explored in detail. So the reasons for going with untethered/stratospheric in preference to this must be both compelling and interesting. It would be fascinating to learn a bit more about that side of the project.
It’s also interesting to note that whilst ‘oppressive’ regimes might have been concerned about Loon, Starlink is going to present a whole different set of concerns. Not only are most nations going to be unable to access, control or block the satellites, with a directional dish antenna pointed straight up, it’s going to be virtually impossible for the regime to be able to identify local broadcasters. As long as data flow were uni-directional - outbound - an oppressive regime could have someone in the middle of the country uploading data and never be aware of it.
Re:Design Decisions (Score:5, Insightful)
Loon was predicated on the assumption that satellite Internet was prohibitively expensive. The dramatic fall in the price to LEO has invalidated that.
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I do wonder if we are rushing into another environmental disaster with huge constellations of LEO satellites. When there are 100k of those things up there the cost to launch may be the least of our worries.
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The full StarLink constellation will be 12,000 satellites.
They will be in well-planned orbits.
Space is big. There is plenty of room.
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They have already asked for additional spectrum for 30,000 more on top of the initial 12,000.
And then you have all the other companies and countries planning their won constellations. The UK, apparently China is looking at it...
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Unless the UK and China buy launches from SpaceX, they're going to have to spend a metric-fuckton of money to launch enough satellites to matter.
Now, it's possible they'll both develop a launcher comparable to Falcon9 (reusable, cheap). I'm not betting on it, but it's possible. But if they do, that's all to the good IMHO. Anything that makes getting into space in a big w
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The UK plans a spaceport, and China is already ramping up domestic launches. Over 40 planned this year, nearly 1 a week.
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At the moment, yes. Cost isn't the biggest issue for them, although I imagine their costs are a fraction as much as disposable rockets in the West cost.
US owes China 2,500 X SpaceX cost (Score:3)
It wouldn't be TOO unusual for China to develop a cheaper copy of something originally developed in the US. China has a metric fuckton of money. Heck, just their US dollar reserves alone are a couple trillion dollars.
Cost of SpaceX development (Falcon 1 & 9) $390 million.
Amount US taxpayers owe China: $1,000,000 million.
Re: US owes China 2,500 X SpaceX cost (Score:1)
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> But NASA has an ANNUAL budget of $23B and they haven't managed to produce reusable SpaceX-like rockets,
Has NASA been trying to produce reusable SpaceX-like rockets?
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NASA's actual mission is to funnel that $23B into carefully selected congressional districts, not to produce a cheap, reusable spacecraft.
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The shuttle flew 135 times and lost the vehicle 2 times.
SpaceX has tried 89 times and lost the vehicle 14 times.
If you're calling the shuttle a failure, I guess you're saying SpaceX is failure times seven?
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> Did SpaceX kill 14 astronauts
If SpaceX ever puts an astronaut in space without killing them, that'll be pretty cool.
So far, they haven't even tried because Elon and (end everyone else) knows that 14 losses out of 89 attempts isn't exactly a reliable vehicle.
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I'm not sure China actually wants to make reusable rockets. Mass production of rockets is a great way to pump money into various industries, many of them fairly important for national security like high end steel manufacturing and technology.
I expect they will eventually but at the moment they seem more focused on actually getting stuff done in space, like building up their next generation space station and heading to the Moon. They have the world's first Mars sample return mission due to land on the red pl
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I'm fairly sure that the UK one is just cronyism. After being booted out of Galileo due to failing to negotiate access for the UK after brexit some pals of the Tory Party looked like they were going to lose money. So naturally the Tories came to their aid with some taxpayer money and set up a half baked space programme.
The planned spaceport will be in Scotland, which will soon be an independent country. It's a lot like the stupid tunnel they want to build to Northern Ireland, which will also surface in Scot
Re:Design Decisions (Score:4, Insightful)
A firing range is also big, with plenty of room, but you wouldn't want to stand in the middle of it. Even if you were between the well-planned firing lines.
Trajectory decay (Score:4, Informative)
A firing range is also big, with plenty of room, but you wouldn't want to stand in the middle of it. Even if you were between the well-planned firing lines.
Let's take the firing range because it's not such a bad metaphor once you look into the details.
1. Air Drag.
Depending on the weapon firing it, bullets have different maximum reach before they fall on the ground.
What's the most important is the muzzle velocity. The slower a bullet goes, the shorter distance it will travel before the air drag will slow it down to the point where gravity takes it to its eventually ground-borne destination.
The whole point of Low Earth Orbits (LEO), is that they are indeed *Low*. At this altitude, even if it is extremely tiny, there are still some remaining trace of the Earth's atmosphere, barely enough to exert some minute drag on any object at these orbits. Which means that eventually, any left there that is not powered will end up falling back on Earth.
Yes, you can imagine have a few catastrophic collisions, but you won't have a long-lasting Kessler syndrome, mostly due to this tendency of orbits to decay eventually. (Contrast this to geo stationary orbits or graveyard orbits which are much farther away from the Earth's influence and where things put there will tend to remain there on the scale of humanity's duration).
There's a reason why ISS is orbiting at these altitude: the "auto-clean" function of LEO's AirDrag means that the risk of encountering possible risk of collision is lower (but the counterpoint is that ISS needs to regularly boost its orbit, otherwise itself would decay to Earth)
So the firing range equivalent of this is walking through a fire range a few kilometres away, when the weapons used are equipped with silencers/suppressors and loaded with sub-sonic rounds (i.e.: the true "silent" shots): yes you are technically down-range, but due to the low muzzle velocity, this bullets will very much be subjected to air drag and won't pose much long-distance danger.
2. Timing and planning.
I supposed you're thinking of firing range like the one visible in police procedural movies, where the range itself is an "absolute no-go zone", and bringing stuff into / out-of the range (e.g.: targets) is done with automatic mechanism.
That's not the only way to operate a firing range. Here around the military ranges (from what I've seen during my state-mandatory stint among the khaki-wearing clowns) have no automatic mechanism, everything is brought into- / out-of those by walking humans (including picking up the empty shell from the ground. For bullet tracking reasons. Don't ask). There are very clear safety procedure in place to make sure that everybody stops firing, secure their weapons, allow people to walk through the range, make sure all people have exited, and resume the exercise. Actual casuality: zero.
There are even exercises done with alternating teams - one advancing while the others cover fires - these are performed with live ammunition. Because the firing lines are extremely well planned and everything is trained a lot, the actual casualties are also surprisingly zero (Though, as a military doctor, that didn't prevent me from being extremely nervous whenever I heard such exercises being announced. I usually spent the evening in the infirmary with on hand close to the emergency phone and the other close to the emergency medic backpack).
Because all these LEO satellite are closely tracked, and because there are efforts to track most significant debris, it is indeed possible to guarantee some very safe launch schedules, avoidance trajectories, etc.
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The full StarLink constellation will be 12,000 satellites.
They will be in well-planned orbits.
Space is big. There is plenty of room.
Space is big. The "don't worry your pretty little head" argument.
You have a quote from Musk somewhere promising "12,000 and that's the limit"? Starlink has actually proposed three shells of satellites, and have requested approval for more batches of satellites beyond the first 12,000 which now total another 48,000 if they are all exercised. So that is 60,000 right there. Then throw in multiple competitors coming along setting up there own equivalent systems. 100,000 may be a very low number a decade from no
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If it had been done without planning and forethought than it could be a problem. But the starlink satellites were designed to naturally decay in short order if they went unresponsive. A few have already done so because when you are launching in those numbers there are bound to be duds.
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I do wonder if we are rushing into another environmental disaster with huge constellations of LEO satellites. When there are 100k of those things up there the cost to launch may be the least of our worries.
I doubt it; there isn't much of an "environment" to damage outside our biosphere, and if you're worried about spent satellites falling back into the atmosphere, compare the mass of material that would contribute to the mass of jet exhaust inserted into the atmosphere hourly -- the former would be a rounding error compared to the latter.
The biggest risks introduced by LEO satellites are navigation hazards to other satellites/spacecraft (which can be managed by keeping the satellites in known traffic lanes, t
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Before SpaceX got serious about blackening their satellites, the obvious disaster would be wreaking havoc on migratory animals that use the stars for navigation (a huge number of them) - when the number of visible satellites outnumber the visible stars stellar navigation becomes useless - good luck spotting patterns among the stationary dots amongst a vast moving swarm.
But the satellites have been dramatically dimmed so that they should only be clearly visible to the naked eye near the horizon, and that pro
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The light pollution issue was a bit overblown. Even without the reflection mitigation, it only happens in the brief period of the orbit where you are in darkness but the satellite isn't. In low orbit this area is fairly small and only happens shortly after sunset and shortly before sunrise. Extended periods of light pollution would only happen near the poles on satellites with very steep inclinations, and only at certain times of year.
Now with the mitigations, as you say, it would only be near the horizon,
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As an addendum, this is also why you have to plan carefully to see the International Space Station. It's huge, and one of the brightest objects in the night sky, and it passes overhead of any given area in its inclination many, many times, but you can only see it at those magic moments when it's in the sunlight and you aren't.
Re:Design Decisions (Score:5, Interesting)
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Plus being tethered means you now have all the same problems cell towers have: you need to secure a plot of land per balloon and comply with local construction codes and permits.
Actually, worse than that. Given the tether will move as the balloon does, I suspect the FAA would require the entire tether be lighted to the same standard as a tower (i.e. red lights every couple hundred feet for use at night, with HIDs at the same distance per day). I further suspect that instead of publishing a NOTAM whenever you are going to do maintenance that your lights will be out, you would have to reel in the balloon (again, because it moves the tether... it's one thing to say "TOWER 15NM NE OF
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Ugh, I meant class A obviously.
Re:Design Decisions (Score:4, Interesting)
I believe the premise of project Loon is that they cut the costs of balloons by letting the float freely in the air and use wind predictions along with machine learning to passively steer the balloons by changing the altitude. This has a number of advantages. Some are:
1. You can use smaller (cheaper) balloons since they do not need to carry the wire used for tethering them.
2. You do not need expensive base stations.
3. You can launch the balloons from central locations (the balloons launched for Puerto Rica after Hurricane Maria were launched from Nevada) cutting down on logistics and launch infrastructure.
But there are also some significant disadvantages. Some of these:
1. Can probably not work in areas with strong winds at height (so, no balloons at mid latitudes where we have strong westerlies). If Loon could have started with providing North America with great internet in remote areas they would probably have had a much bigger chance of success and may have beaten Starlink on costs and coverage.
2. Not entirely predictable. You may have areas where there is no coverage for days. Starlink is entirely predictable.
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The primary advantage of a stratospheric system is coverage. Tethered balloons cover a small area, a few to a couple dozen square kilometers depending on altitude. The Loon balloons covered hundreds of square kilometers, and even though the equipment was more expensive you only needed one installation instead of a couple dozen to cover the same area.
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It’s also interesting to note that whilst ‘oppressive’ regimes might have been concerned about Loon, Starlink is going to present a whole different set of concerns. Not only are most nations going to be unable to access, control or block the satellites, with a directional dish antenna pointed straight up, it’s going to be virtually impossible for the regime to be able to identify local broadcasters. As long as data flow were uni-directional - outbound - an oppressive regime could have someone in the middle of the country uploading data and never be aware of it.
Actually, it's pretty much exactly the same concerns - either way you've got mostly-vertical communication with a foreign-controlled internet relay. The difference is that governments don't have jurisdiction over the orbital space above their country. I mean, they could certainly try to assert it - shooting down satellites,etc. - but given that the powerful nations have established precedent amongst each other, any upstart rocking the boat is likely to face universal retribution. They're in a stronger po
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This wasn't the worst idea. It however would have made more sense, realistically, to:
- put the equipment on zeppelins that were automated, that could go up and down in the atmosphere as well as circumnavigate (eg against the direction of the wind) Basically you have them perpetually go east in the northern hemisphere and perpetually go west in the southern hemisphere, and if they need to change directions they go though the equator doldrums.
- have additional tethered balloons towed behind it to maintain dis
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It rarely makes sense to repair a satellite, especially when technology is advancing quickly.
Just deorbit and replace.
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Boy you can sell those Tesla fanbois anything and call it a success even when its massively in the black.
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Starlink won't be in the black for years, it's hemorrhaging red ink for now, and that's expected. Why would you assume that a business that so far has just started its second group of Alpha-testers (they're calling it a Beta test, but it really isn't) would already be making money?
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Starlink is also still in beta, with intermittent coverage of many areas and only a fraction of the capacity they're planning to launch.
Re: crazy as it sounded (Score:1)
That Starlink has managed to show success without having to deal with too many bureaucracies was probably just the nail in the coffin.
Starlink hasn.t yet begun to offer service to other countries, numbnuts.
Re: crazy as it sounded (Score:2)
But i thought Government was panaceea ? (Score:1)
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That's only some utter shit governments standing in the way. Venezuela? Peru? Kenya? Mozambique?
Not to mention the notion of "independent" sounds very wrong for most of utter shit governments (should I have said "dictatorships"?).
Re:But i thought Government was panaceea ? (Score:5, Insightful)
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I would. I don't live in the USA.
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I'm totally OK with that as long as I can use encryption/VPN/SSH/DNSSEC/DoT/DoH/etc.
Right now I'm in a country which is ostensibly democratic yet VPN doesn't work for at least half a dozen major providers which I've tried including ProtonVPN. Connections to their servers are silently dropped (UDP/TCP traffic to any ports including 53/443 which is often used for obfuscation) - DPI [wikipedia.org] here works beautifully. At least I can use SSH/RDP but most people are not aware of this option.
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You really have no idea what a dictatorship is, do you? It doesn't mean "some government that I don't know anything about but am willing to look down on."
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I lived under one for a good part of my life.
No, I don't mean a perceived dictatorship, but a real, 100% frightening one. People torn from their beds at night, disappearing for good, the USSR bordering my country and effectively ruling it, food being scarce, power being cut off every day for hours, because "factories must produce", brainwashing, propaganda, unique party, all the bad things you can name in a dictatorship, I experienced them.
I know more about a dictatorship than you would ever do. Any more qu
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Well, you seem to think Peru and Venezuela are dictatorships, so either your concept of what a dictatorship is seems very flawed or you don't know shit about the countries you're accusing of being ones.
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Peru is not. Venezuela on the other hand...
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So the guy who got 70% of the vote in an election that international observers judged 'free and fair" (a designation our own elections can't boast of, BTW) is a "dictator"? is that the new definition?
Nope, it's not.
dictator noun
dictator | \ dik-t-tr
, dik-t- \
Definition of dictator
1a : a person granted absolute emergency power especially, history : one appointed by the senate (see senate sense 1a) of ancient Rome
b : one holding complete autocratic control : a person with unlimited governmental power
c : one
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I'm gonna piss straight in your Cheerios: a person definitely can be fairly elected by a majority of the population and become a dictator afterwards.
One thing doesn't negate the other.
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Sure, but that hasn't happened in Venezuela for over three decades. Care to tell me another fairy story? That one wasn't very entertaining.
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Feel free to move there and live there if you like the way things are right now.
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We'll be moving to Peru in the next year or so anyway. We don't have family in Venezuela.
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Said every Uber driver ever.
If you do something similar on a shoestring budget (Score:2)
Solution looking for a problem (Score:5, Informative)
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Kenya and surrounds are probably less subject to the kinds of problems [engadget.com] where Loon has come in handy -- for the time being [nytimes.com], in any case.
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I am Kenyan . This project doesn't solve any problem that 3G and 4G networks already solve . Kenya does have its fair share of problems , but basic internet connectivity isn't one of them in most places .
According to this coverage map [nperf.com] Kenya's cellular network coverage is extremely limited. It covers the major cities and the travel corridor from Kisumu to Mombasa, but that's it. Of course, that's where most of the people live, but this is the problem of cellular network coverage everywhere: It only covers the densely-populated areas. Even in wealthy countries coverage is spotty to nonexistent away from population areas. The point of Loon was to provide coverage to the less-populated regions.
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You just chose a shit map. It claims there is only coverage on one street of a major city? What?
This was also in the first page of results:
http://www.kenya-advisor.com/k... [kenya-advisor.com]
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You just chose a shit map. It claims there is only coverage on one street of a major city? What?
This was also in the first page of results:
http://www.kenya-advisor.com/k... [kenya-advisor.com]
And that also shows very limited coverage outside of major cities and travel corridors.
Also, note that the link I provided allows you to select the carrier. You need to look at different carriers to get a good picture.
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And that also shows very limited coverage outside of major cities and travel corridors.
They have T-Mobile there too?
Re:Solution looking for a problem (Score:4, Insightful)
Yeah, that's where orbital internet has an advantage - the same satellites that that provide coverage for poorly-served areas in rich nations, can also provide coverage for poor, sparsely populated regions on the opposite side of the world in their "down time", with no incremental increase in cost other than a few more regional base stations.
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I think the point of the OP was that this was a solution without enough customers.
The reason this was shut down is that they couldn't make enough money.
RTFA. It was shut down because they couldn't get government approvals.
Sad reality (Score:2)
Looks like the project hasn't failed - the authoritarian governments have, which is not surprising.
And those in power can afford to use a satellite Internet connection, no problem. However allowing an easy access to the Internet from a company which might or might not comply with your orders? Not going to happen.
Re: Sad reality (Score:5, Insightful)
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You need proof that the nation that's imprisoning, torturing, raping and murdering over a million of its own people in concentration and "re-education" camps is... spying on other people? As if that's somehow past their lofty moral standards?
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Authoritarian? You think the Peruvian government is authoritarian? If my wife wasn't asleep I'd LOL. The best adjective that I can find to describe the Peruvian government is "chaos". Maybe "disorganized" if I'm being generous.
Yeah, they didn't have enough money (Score:2)
Sputnik set an important precedent (Score:3)
That countries did not own the space above them. The Americans were a little relieved that this one was resolved before it became an issue.
But how high does the atmosphere go?
And how could third world countries shoot down the very high balloons anyway?
And how do you keep a balloon in one place? They will blow all over the place, mainly west to east. I assumed the idea was that if you had enough of them then the whole world would be covered by their random movements. But satellites would have to be more predictable.
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After all once it floats east to the Indian ocean what do you do when its floating over nothing until it hits well somewhere around Peru.
Change its altitude until it flies back.
The wind direction reverses between low and high levels. (Actually, to a first order approximation the wind vector traces a helix as you run it up/down.) By adjusting the balloon's altitude to put it where the wind is going the right direction, you can usually make it go about where you want and then orbit the desired site.
You don'
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Also: If you have a small helium tank aboard you can inflate the balloon more by venting it into the balloon, or deflate it a bit with a tiny compressor to pump helium back into the tank.
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The rules are a bit clearer for balloons because they operate in the same space as aircraft, so get regulated the same way.
Unfortunately surface to air missiles are not that expensive and even poorer countries and rebel groups have them now.
Balloons navigate by changing altitude, switching between winds moving in different directions. It's not very precise but works because they cover large areas.
The real reason of course is (Score:5, Insightful)
There's just no money in it.
When you have to fly balloons to provide internet service somewhere, that somewhere is 100% certain to be populated with people who
1/ Have no money to spend on shit pushed by Google Ads
2/ Don't have habits and personal information worth monetizing by Google on the global privacy invasion market
The suspicious authoritarian regimes thing might have been the final nail in the coffin, but there was a coffin to drive a nail into in the first place.
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There's just no money in it.
When you have to fly balloons to provide internet service somewhere, that somewhere is 100% certain to be populated with people who
1/ Have no money to spend on shit pushed by Google Ads 2/ Don't have habits and personal information worth monetizing by Google on the global privacy invasion market
The suspicious authoritarian regimes thing might have been the final nail in the coffin, but there was a coffin to drive a nail into in the first place.
This is actually quite insightful. I can totally imagine the leaders of Africans countries deciding not to allow an American company known for gathering massive amounts of data on the population to permanently fly balloons over their nation.
"get these government sign-offs" (Score:1)
Welcome to life in the turd world.
Obvious (Score:2)
It's therefore obvious that these countries would impose heavy regulatory oversight on the Google Loom project. I envision the same happening with Starlink, which will be banned in countries like Russia, China and India, unless they can control traffic on the network or at least the on-off switch.
My guess is (Score:4, Informative)
1100 Musk Satellites over the balloon ruined the communication if not the business model.
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sounds like a doomed project (Score:3, Insightful)
...if they were truly surprised that the idea of floating balloons over countries might trigger suspicions of surveillance.
How staggeringly naive.
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Re: typical privileged Americans (Score:1)
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I think that POV is frankly as puerile and simplistic as the one you yourself criticize.
Or simply out of touch?
I'm not sure how much time you've spent in US schools lately, but frankly there hasn't been much 'rah-rah America is great' since the early 1980s. If any, it exists in elementary schools where the lessons about history have to stick to broad simple narratives.
High schools on the other hand have since then drifted into a fairly bifurcated education, where some teachers are very much "America and ev
USA? (Score:1)
Seems to me that the problem isn't that Venezuela wouldn't let you fly your balloons -- the problem is that you tried to fly your balloons in Venezuela.
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Before Starlink appeared, there were plenty of people in the USA in rural areas with crappy internet and the money to pay for better.
Starlink has barely even rolled out in beta form. You're making it sound like a massive success.
Long duration drones may be better (Score:2)
Sometimes you need to start small (Score:2)
I mean, it took awhile to create the Internet.
Usually when you go for a completely owned land grab (air grab?), people will shut you down. But, let things "become popular" on their own slowly, these things tend to stay.
What will the flat earthers do, now? (Score:1)
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There are plenty of groups out there that are not relevant to this coversation.
Would you prefer an open source decentralized vers (Score:1)
If so, you should really check out Openairships.com.
It would be much better for society if the internet was a resource controlled by the citizenry, rather than giant corporations or government.
Would love criticism on the white paper.