Alphabet’s Project Loon Will Be Winding Things Down

About 6-7 years ago, Google launched a moonshot project called Project Loon. The idea was simple – use balloons and launch them into the sky and float them to remote places and provide those places with internet. It was a grand idea, but unfortunately it wasn’t exactly a profitable one.

This is why it doesn’t come as a surprise to learn that Alphabet (Google’s parent company) has announced that they will be shutting Project Loon down. According to the announcement, “Sadly, despite the team’s groundbreaking technical achievements over the last 9 years — doing many things previously thought impossible, like precisely navigating balloons in the stratosphere, creating a mesh network in the sky, or developing balloons that can withstand the harsh conditions of the stratosphere for more than a year — the road to commercial viability has proven much longer and riskier than hoped.”

Alphabet notes that a handful of employees will continue to remain on to help wrap things up, and that they are hoping that they will be able to find these employees roles at Alphabet’s other companies, like Google.

The good news though, is that Project Loon wasn’t completely for nothing. The company notes that some of the technology they used for Project Loon has been incorporated into Project Taara, another attempt by Alphabet to bring internet to Sub-Saharan Africa.

Tyler Lee
Categories: General
Tags: alphabet, Google, project loon