Comment by mbokinala
10 months ago
Congrats on the launch! Seeing this reminded me of building and launching a high-altitude weather balloon with some buddies back in high school - one of the coolest projects I've gotten to work on.
If it's not proprietary, I'd love to know - how do you "steer" vertically between different wind layers to move in the direction you want to go?
Can't wait to see where you guys take this!
We think balloons are pretty cool too!
So I can't get into exactly how we do our altitude control, but the Google Loon project has a really great explanation of how they made their (very big) balloons go up and down: https://x.company/projects/loon/
Loon made all of their research public after they shut down, and we're obviously heavily inspired by their work. Our systems use a lot of the tech they pioneered, just on a much, much smaller scale (for reference, Loon's balloons were the size of tennis courts) Here's the PDF in case you're interested in checking out the 400+ page writeup: https://storage.googleapis.com/x-prod.appspot.com/files/The%...
Awesome, thanks for sharing!