Surely we have a better use for Helium?
We come bearing internet: Google sends up Project Loon balloons in second test
Google is to run another test flight for its Project Loon internet-bringing balloons, this time sending up 20 new helium gas bags in Australia in partnership with Telstra. The Australian Associated Press reported that a second trial of the moonshot project will be taking place over western Queensland in December. Google had …
COMMENTS
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Monday 17th November 2014 13:55 GMT Chris G
Fruit of the loon
I think Googloons may be marginally better than similar from Farce book but the end result is people without a pot to piss in receiving targeted advertising.
Must be a long term investment: educate them through the Internet, create an economy and then target them with ads. Still better than nothing , maybe.
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Monday 17th November 2014 14:08 GMT Ralph B
Astronomers! Wake Up!
If they thought light pollution and current electromagnetic interence was bad, how's it going to be when there are few thousand (or million?)* of these Google Loon balloons floating around, blocking the light, radioing to each other and the ground users & basestations. I predict that astronomers will mightily annoyed when they take their eyes off their viewfinders and finally notice.
(Maybe we'll have to just give up Astronomy, when the Loon Cloud renders the rest of the Universe invisible to us.)
* Has anyone actually calculated how many balloons Google will need for the final, working system?
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Monday 17th November 2014 19:46 GMT Cynic_999
Re: Why use Helium ?
Hydrogen effuses about 1.4 times faster than helium, but has about half the density of helium (H2 molecular mass=2, He molecular mass=4) and so has quite a bit more lifting power - which allows the envelope to be thicker (heavier). In addition it should be possible to put some sort of apparatus in the balloon that generates replacement hydrogen either by a chemical process or electrolysis, or maybe compressed in a small cylinder.
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Monday 17th November 2014 20:50 GMT Hood
I take a look at the Oceana section in flightradar24.com every so often and these ballons were showing up as a weird looking plane over NZ until they got allocated their own balloon icon. Also saw that they had tried them over western QLD when there was three of them between Roma and Longreach. Click on the icon and it showed the meandering track it had been following.