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.
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.
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