Alphabet is ending its Loon initiative that used high-altitude balloons to provide internet connectivity to remote locations and places hit by disasters. Loon CEO Alastair Westgarth broke the news in an online message posted on Thursday, January 21. Westgarth said it had been unable to turn Loon into a commercially viable business, forcing it to wind down operations over the coming months after eight years of work. “While we’ve found a number of willing partners along the way, we haven’t found a way to get the costs low enough to build a long-term, sustainable business,” the CEO wrote, adding that developing new technology is always “inherently risky.” Westgarth praised his team for achieving a number of firsts, including developing new ways to safely fly a lighter-than-air vehicle for hundreds of days in the stratosphere to any place in the world, building a system for quickly and reliably launching a vehicle the size of a tennis court, and setting up a global supply chain for a completely new technology and business. In another post, Astro Teller, who leads Alphabet’s X moonshot unit where Loon started life before being spun off into its own company in 2018, offered up some of the highlights… Read full this story
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