Google Details New Project Loon Tech to Keep Its Internet Balloons Afloat

At Google's annual I/O developer conference this week, the company unveiled updates to its Android operating system, talked up new ways to turn smartphones into virtual reality headsets, and rebooted its attempt to break into digital payments with Android Pay. It didn't spend much time, however, discussing one of its most ambitious initiatives: Project Loon, Google's effort to beam broadband Internet access down to remote or rural regions of the globe from a network of stratosphere-roaming balloons.

Loon was started inside the company's Google X lab in 2011 and has accompanied other high-flying efforts, such as one to fly solar-powered drones transmitting wireless Internet signals. One drone crashed on May 1. (Facebook, as part of its Internet.org initiative, also has drones of its own.) At the time of Google's early Loon trials in 2013, balloons stayed in the air for about five days, and Google could keep only a few up there at a time. It also took more than a dozen employees to launch each balloon—not a system that could grow efficiently around the world in the way envisioned by Chief Executive Officer Larry Page and his co-founder and Google X chief, Sergey Brin.