Google spin-off Aalyria picks up Project Loon tech for US military

Enlarge / Aalyria's vision of a connected Earth, although SpaceX's Starlink network SpaceX already looks like this. Alyria

A pair of reports from CNBC and Bloomberg detail a new Google connectivity spin-off called "Aalyria". The new company appears to be taking the canceled tech from Project Loon, rebranding it under a new brand name, and bringing it out of Alphabet as an independent company, where it will hopefully survive in the wasteland. The company apparently went public today, with a stunning new website.

Project Loon has been a Google/Alphabet company for eight years and wanted to bring internet to low connectivity areas with flying cell towers suspended overhead by weather balloons. It's kind of the same idea as a satellite in low earth orbit, but rather than a satellite in space, these balloons were only 20 km in the air. In addition to having to constantly navigate through the various atmospheric airways, Loon Balloons must be continually picked up and re-thrown to maintain a steady flow of air balloons. As well as being a reference to large weather balloons, the name "Loon" was chosen as a nod to the idea's infeasibility. Eventually, this infeasibility turned out to be mostly a money issue, and Google shut down Loon in 2021, saying it wasn't a "long-term sustainable business".

The CNBC report paints the fallout as another consequence of Google CEO Sundar Pichai's plan to cut costs at Google. Pichai said in August that "overall productivity is not where it needs to be" and that the company would "consolidate where investments overlap and streamline processes." CNBC says the push to cut costs means Google is looking to "push up or down on experimental projects." Some Alphabet companies, like Waymo, have tapped outside funding to stay afloat.

Enlarge / Aalyria's space laser. Alyria

Aalyria's two major technologies are "Tightbeam" and "Spacetime". Tightbeam appears to be born out of Project Loon research and uses a laser to communicate with satellites. Project Loon used lasers for intra-balloon communication, and now Aalyria promises to transmit data to space, ground, and airborne targets "at faster speeds than any other solution available today and covering greater distances." than previously imagined". SpaceX, which is probably Aalyria's biggest competitor in bringing the internet to low-connectivity spaces, already uses lasers for satellite-to-satellite communication.

Spacetime is "a software platform for orchestrating networks on land, sea, air, space and beyond". The Aalyria site indicates that the software is intended to "orchestrate networks of ground stations, aircraft, satellites, ships and urban meshes". Spacetime "continuously optimizes and evolves antenna link planning, network traffic routing, and spectrum resources, responding in real time to changing network requirements" and is "designed for interoperability with architectures legacy, hybrid, 5G NTN and FutureG networks".

Loon had to manage a loosely linked network of constant movements (and cras...