X Blog

From https://x.company/projects/makani/:

> In 2020 Makani’s journey as a company came to an end [0]. To share the lessons and insights the Makani team gained from their 13 year journey developing an entirely new kind of wind energy technology, the team created The Energy Kite Collection, a portfolio of resources including a technical report, Makani’s entire avionics, flight controls and simulation code repositories [1], flight logs [2] for every crosswind flight of the M600 prototype, technical videos [3], a new simulation tool called KiteFAST [4] created with the National Renewable Energy Laboratory, and a non-assertion pledge [5] for the free use of Makani’s worldwide patent portfolio.

I just wanna say that this -- all of it, the entire paragraph! -- is absolutely amazing (well, except for the end of the company, of course).

---

[0]: https://blog.x.company/a-long-and-windy-road-f8e09d02c9e1

[1]: https://github.com/google/makani

[2]: https://console.cloud.google.com/marketplace/product/bigquery-public-datasets/makani-logs

[3]: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL7og_3Jqea4VRCZmMNK4LDH64sYgkLZzv

[4]: https://github.com/rafmudaf/openfast/tree/kitefast

[5]: https://storage.googleapis.com/x-prod.appspot.com/files/Makani%20Non-Assertion%20Pledge.pdf

AFAIK, many other big-name companies have been donating manpower and resources to help get PR back on its feet. What makes this announcement any more noteworthy? I'd get it if it included a bit more information, but the blog post reads as marketing fluff.

Does anyone know of any reliable sources showing in-depth sample numbers from previous deployments? I'd be really interested in getting an idea of what area size these balloons could cover, for how long it can be reliably maintained over an area, and their expected throughput. The Helping out in Peru [0] post has a bit of info, but it's very light on details.

If anyone is familiarized with these industries, I'd love to read up on the kinds of challenges faced with getting something like this deployed. Looking at it from an outsider's perspective, being without connectivity for over a month seems like a pretty long time. It's great that Project Loon is seeing improvements in their deployment time, but the article doesn't shed any light on the process, which is rather disappointing.

[0] https://blog.x.company/helping-out-in-peru-9e5a84839fd2

Definitely the most interesting part of this project in my opinion.

> This is the first time we have used our new machine learning powered algorithms to keep balloons clustered over Puerto Rico, so we’re still learning how best to do this. As we get more familiar with the constantly shifting winds in this region, we hope to keep the balloons over areas where connectivity is needed for as long as possible.

https://blog.x.company/how-project-loons-smart-software-learned-to-sail-the-winds-ec904e6d08c

Apparently, back in 2016 they launched the balloons from Puerto Pico to do their first test of the autopilot system in Peru. Now they are flying the balloons from Nevada to implement it in Puerto Rico.

> we had figured out how to cluster balloons in teams, dancing in small loops on the stratospheric winds, over a particular region.

My local well drilling guy has offered "geothermal" for years (decades?) Despite a large inventory of wealthy second home owners, he didn't get and still doesn't get many takers. Meanwhile, rooftop solar is everywhere.

My parents almost bought their "retirement home" with an existing geothermal system - it remains the only "real world" home instance of this technology that I have encountered.

$20K also seems very close to the price he told me years ago - I fail to see the innovation here. I'm sure there's something here, but the article doesn't help illuminate it.

Edit: Another HNer posted this, apparently it's a cheaper drilling technique: https://blog.x.company/introducing-dandelion-2706eded169a

Airships like a Zeppelin or blimp have some propulsive component to them that let them navigate without the wind.

A balloon can only navigate by catching different winds at different altitudes. When you can control the altitude from 60,000 feet to 120,000 feet there is a significant amount of variation in the direction of winds.

https://www.govtech.com/question-of-the-day/what-is-now-steering-alphabets-loon-internet-balloons.html

https://blog.x.company/drifting-efficiently-through-the-stratosphere-using-deep-reinforcement-learning-c38723ee2e90