How Google Will Use High-Flying Balloons to Deliver Internet to the Hinterlands

Wired – by Steven Levy

Not much happens in Geraldine, a small farming community in the interior of the South Island of New Zealand, about 85 miles from Christchurch. So when Hayden MacKenzie, a fourth-generation farmer there, picked up the phone last Tuesday and got a request to participate in a secret project—one that he wouldn’t even learn about until he signed a vow of silence—he and his wife Anna figured that they’d take a shot. That evening, two men showed up at his cozy farmhouse. They bore a peculiar red device, a sphere slightly bigger than a volleyball perched on a short collar, and attached it to his roof. Then they left.  

Only when the men returned the next day did they reveal what they were up to. Inside the red ball was an antenna that would give the MacKenzies Internet access. It was custom-designed to communicate with a similar antenna that would be floating by in the stratosphere, over 60,000 feet above sea level. On a solar-powered balloon.

Oh, and the men work for Google.

“It sounded crazy,” says MacKenzie, who bears a slight resemblance to the actor Colm Meaney. “But at the end of the day, you hope things will work out.”

The idea does sound crazy, even for Google—so much so that the company has dubbed it Project Loon. But if all works according to the company’s grand vision, hundreds, even thousands, of high-pressure balloons circling the earth could provide Internet to a significant chunk of the world’s 5 billion unconnected souls, enriching their lives with vital news, precious educational materials, lifesaving health information, and images of grumpy cats.

It is an audacious proposal, and today in Christchurch, Google is holding a press conference with New Zealand’s prime minister to formally unveil it. Google will also stage Project Loon’s biggest trial yet: 50 testers in Christchurch within the 12-mile range of the balloons will see if they can get connected from the sky.

But on the morning of June 13, 2013, the MacKenzies were waiting to be among the first to sample it.

The team began to set up for launch in a remote part of New Zealand well before dawn. Launch sites are chosen based on wind patterns at high altitude; this launch site was chosen to provide the best service to the Christchurch region.

Project Loon began a little under two years ago, incubating in Google’s high-risk research arm, Google X. Rich DeVaul, an expert in wearable technology (his MIT dissertation was on “Memory Glasses”), had recently arrived from a secretive post at Apple to become a “rapid evaluator.” His job assignment was to consider crazy ideas that just might work, and find reasons why they definitely would not work. “Our goal at Google X is to kill a project as fast as we can,” says Astro Teller, who runs the lab with Google co-founder Sergey Brin.

At first, providing reliable Internet access using balloons seemed a natural candidate for a quick rejection. There were a number of obvious problems, many of them involving the limits of ballooning, a centuries-old craft that still retained deep mysteries. No one had managed to maintain control and power for the long-duration flights that Google would need.

DeVaul, though, had an idea for “variable buoyancy”—steering the balloons by tweaking altitude to find wind currents whooshing in the right direction. Google, which is pretty good at computation, could use the voluminous government data available to accurately simulate wind currents in the stratosphere. After weeks of spreadsheeting, unsuccessfully trying to find a flaw in the scheme, DeVaul felt confident enough to pitch the project.

“My colleagues had to believe I wasn’t completely on crack, which took a little bit of convincing,” he says.

In August 2011, DeVaul began a series of trial runs in California’s Central Valley. He and some colleagues would launch a hand-made balloon with a Linux computer and some antennas on board, then hop into his Subaru Forester. They’d race on rural roads to capture the signal before the rig went down—or floated towards distant points east. Most flights were failures of some sort. None of the balloon terminations, however, gave DeVaul a reason to kill the project, no matter how hard he tried. “It was really impressive how long he carried that goal of killing the idea,” says Astro Teller.

By early 2012, the experiment had gained status of a genuine Google X project. It also had a new leader. DeVaul, preferring to work on tech rather than management, helped hire a project leader, Mike Cassidy, a top search engineer who had started multiple companies before joining Google. Cassidy built up the team with network engineers, mapping specialists, energy experts, and ex-military operatives who were stunningly good at recovering downed payloads in wilderness terrain. (When balloons would go down, the payload would separate and glide earthward by parachute. Civilians stumbling on the scary-looking package would see a non-branded message reading HARMLESS SCIENCE EXPERIMENT, and a promise of a reward for those who called a number to return it.) When it became clear that Google needed many more balloons that its small team was able to hand-craft, Cassidy began a fruitful collaboration with Raven Aerostar, the company that makes weather balloons for NASA and created the monster bubble that took Felix Baumgartner into near space for his record leap earthward.

Soon, Project Loon was ready to attain the rare status of an initiative officially acknowledged as part of Google X (along with self-driving cars and Google Glass). This announcement would come at a big press conference following a trial where the company attempted to give Internet access to real people, not just Google testers.

And, in part to avoid flyovers invading potentially hostile nations, Google decided to do this in a distant land with huge swaths of rural inhabitants who yearned for broadband: New Zealand.

 

Photo: Jon Shenk

 

Lake Tekapo is smack in Lord of the Rings territory, ringed by majestic mountains. On June 13, it shimmers from a rare cloudless sky on the cusp of winter. This remote terrain is 35 miles away from Geraldine, where the MacKenzies are still marveling at the odd thing attached to their roof. Next to a bare asphalt airstrip, Rich DeVaul is giving me and some other rubberneckers a quick tour of Google’s balloon launch pad.

Hours earlier, Google transported the equipment from a huge unmarked warehouse in Christchurch, its windows covered by wood slats like many other earthquake-damaged structures in a city devastated by a 2011 temblor. All this odd equipment imbues the Tekapo site with the feel of the staging ground inClose Encounters of the Third Kind. Googlers in fleece and down vests scurry around a huge tarp, ministering to five “envelopes”—the term for the high-tensity, polyethylene balloons—resting on red plastic covers. The envelopes seem no more glamorous than long garbage bags and, indeed, at three-thousands of an inch thick, not even a premium brand. But the high-tech polyethylene can in fact stave off tremendous pressure.

Attached to the bottom of each envelope is the 22-pound “payload.” It’s topped by a sheet of solar paneling the size of a basketball backboard. Beneath the solar sheet is a construct resembling a large camera tripod, whose legs are antennas that allow the balloons to transmit to their peers in a mesh network. And on the bottom of the structure is a metal-sided container resembling a deep fuse box, which contains the computers, electronics, GPS devices, and batteries to store the energy gathered by the solar panels (each about 10 times the size of a laptop battery). It also controls valves that go inside the balloon’s internal chambers, allowing the balloon to find the desired altitude to maintain its flight path. Dangling from the box is a cable ending in a piece of foam that looks like a slice of a kid’sswimming noodle; inside is a transponder that beams location to air-traffic controllers and other trackers.

It’s time to launch. As team members take positions to stabilize and hold down the balloon, a machine that seems an artifact from the industrial age begins pumping helium into an envelope with a sound like a thousand hot showers channeled through Jimi Hendrix’s amps. And the clear plastic starts to rise. A blob-ish lump awakens inside the balloon skin, quickly growing from waist level to three times human height. As more gas enters, a classic balloon, like Dorothy’s vehicle to Oz, takes shape, at first looking like a giant pumpkin, then resembling a swimming jellyfish, straining for the ocean surface.

The flight engineer organizing the launch begins a classic NASA-esque backwards countdown, and chatter subsides as the numbers decline. At zero, a Googler holding a yellow sheet of matting called “the peanut”—it’s wrapped around the neck of the balloon to keep the payload from dangling during inflation—lets go. The mass jumps skyward, tugging the payload off the ground. It rises nimbly and steadily, and soon it’s hard to tell the difference between this giant translucent mass (a Loon balloon will grow to the size of a small aircraft) and a child’s toy floating above rooftop level.

The balloon as it launches is not fully inflated. As it rises, the air pressure difference expands the balloon at its float altitude around 20 km, or 65,000 ft.

A few of us rush to nearby helicopters, and strap in. I’m sitting behind DeVaul as he tracks the trajectory on his Nexus tablet, using a bespoke program called Mission Control. The display resembles a peace-loving variation of Missile Command, as it maps the motion and predicted path of balloons in flight. But it’s actually a complicated simulation system, capable of analyzing the weather data in theNOAA (National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration) system and directing the balloons, via satellite communications, to the ideal altitudes for their flight path.

Mission Control also lets Loon engineers terminate flights. Two days earlier, Google had conducted its first New Zealand test, launching five balloons. After successful passes over the South Island, the balloons had continued east. Two wound up in the waters off New Zealand’s coast, the payloads recovered by a waiting Googler at sea. DeVaul’s tablet now shows that others are making quick progress across the Pacific. Google would eventually terminate the flights, because the company hadn’t gotten around to informing the authorities in Chile about the possibility of high-altitude Internet balloons invading its airspace, and decided not to risk an international incident.

As DeVaul monitors Mission Control, the pilot dizzyingly pivots around the snow-capped mountains, trying to provide his passengers a glimpse of the just-launched balloon. But even at the optimum viewing angle—from glass panels on the helicopter roof—the balloon is barely visible, well above the copter’s 10,000-foot ceiling. It’s on its way to 60,000 feet, twice the altitude of commercial airlines, where it will soar over the weather.

Nonetheless, our helicopter outraces the balloon to Geraldine, clearing the mountains and passing over miles and miles of verdant farmland. We set down in the Mackenzie’s property, in front of a barn and within sight of a small herd of grazing sheep.

The farmhouse is close by, with the telltale red antenna ball attached to the roof. Greeting us are Loon team members who have been onsite for hours, led by network engineering lead Cyrus Behroozi. Up above, the sky is a jewel-like blue. And if you squint, you can see a tiny white speck high above. Behroozi tells us the connection should be working now.

Anna MacKenzie leads us into her house, past her sleeping infant son, and flicks on her vintage HP laptop. The browser window opens and fills. She’s on! She checks a site known as the eBay of New Zealand, where her husband has been eying tractors for his contracting business. Pictures of farm machinery scroll at a zippy pace.

Welcome to Balloon Internet.

The MacKenzies are actually the second successful Loon pilot testers in New Zealand. On Google’s earlier launch two days ago, an entrepreneur named Charles Nimmo, of Leeston, a tiny town 40 clicks southwest of Christchurch, attained the distinction of being the first civilian connected. The first page he accessed was Google search. “It seemed only fair,” he later explained.

But DeVaul hadn’t yet arrived in New Zealand when Nimmo found the Internet; the MacKenzies are the first outsiders connected by his hard-won scheme. He seems a little stunned at the accomplishment. “Two years ago, this idea was just scribbles on a whiteboard,” he says. “The next part is seeing how the world reacts to this.”

There are plenty of hurdles ahead for Project Loon. But, for now, Rich DeVaul is out of reasons to kill his project.

All photos: Courtesy of Google

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