Comment by tndl

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%...