In 2013, Google shocked us by announcing Project Loon, an effort to distribute wireless connections from balloons floating 20 km above the Earth. Now, as first reported by WiredGoogle’s parent company Alphabet is turning it off, apparently because it couldn’t make the whole thing commercially viable. Loon’s CEO, Alistair Westgarth, wrote in a blog post that “While we found several willing partners along the way, we didn’t find a way to cut costs enough to build a long-term sustainable business.”
In 2018, Loon (along with Wing delivery drones) moved from X moonshot projects to complete divisions within Alphabet. But now the CEO of X and president of Loon, Astro Teller, writes “despite the team’s innovative technical achievements over the past 9 years, the road to commercial viability has proved much longer and riskier than expected”.