Google subsidiary Aalyria rescues Project Loon technology for US military

A pair of reports from CNBC and Bloomberg detail a new spin-off from Google called Aalyria. It looks like the new company is taking the canceled Project Loon technology, repackaging it under a new brand name, and spinning it off Alphabet as an independent company where it will hopefully survive in the wilderness. Apparently, the company is going public today with a sleek 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 hung overhead on weather balloons. It’s roughly the same idea as a satellite in low Earth orbit, but instead of a satellite in space, these balloons were only 20 km in the air. In addition to having to constantly move through various atmospheric ducts, the Loon balloons had to be constantly rebuilt and relaunched to maintain a constant flow of balloons overhead. In addition to being a reference to large weather balloons, the name “Loon”was chosen as a nod to how unrealistic the idea is. In the end, this impossibility turned out to be mostly just a money problem, and Google shut down Loon in 2021, stating,

In the CNBC report, this spin-off is another consequence of Google CEO Sundar Pichai’s plan to cut costs at Google. Pichai said in August that “performance overall is not where it should be”and that the company will “consolidate where investments overlap and streamline processes.”CNBC says the drive to cut costs means Google is looking to “promote or scale back pilot projects.”Some Alphabet companies, such as Waymo, have raised outside funding to stay afloat.

Aaliriya’s two big 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 to communicate within the balloon, and now Aalyria promises to transmit data to space, ground and air targets “at a speed that exceeds any other solution available today and cover greater distances than previously thought.”SpaceX, which is arguably Aalyria’s biggest competitor in bringing Internet to low-connectivity spaces, is already using lasers to communicate between satellites.

Spacetime is “a software platform for managing networks on land, at sea, in the air, in space and beyond.”Aalyria’s website states that the software is designed to “organize networks of ground stations, aircraft, satellites, ships, and metropolitan area networks.”Spacetime “optimizes and continually evolves antenna link planning, network traffic routing, and spectrum resources in real-time response to changing network requirements”and is “designed to interoperate with legacy, hybrid spatial, 5G NTN and FutureG network architectures.”

Loon had to manage a loosely connected network of constantly moving (and falling) balloons, and building an internet service on top of this unstable infrastructure likely required robust routing software. Bloomberg says: “The key technology behind Spacetime is algorithms that predict, for example, when an aircraft is about to lose contact with a given satellite or ground station, and then send a new signal towards the aircraft without wasting a second.”

CNBC reports that Alphabet retains a minority stake in the new startup, and Alphabet has “transferred intellectual property, patents and physical assets to Aalyria for nearly a decade, including office space.”Aalyria will need to survive on funding from sources other than Alphabet, including funding from Accel, J2 Ventures and Housatonic.

The startup appears to have a strong US military focus right now, including an $8.7 million “commercial contract”with the US defense innovation division. The “under contract”section of the Aalyria website displays logos for the US Space Force, Space Warfare Analysis Center, US Air Force, and US Special Operations Command. The company’s advisory board includes former Deputy Secretary of Defense Robert O. Wark and former US Space Force Director of Innovation and Technology Kim Kreider.

Back in July, the U.S. Defense Innovation Division issued a press release about the Aaliriya contract, saying, “A fully networked battlespace has been a dream for commanders for decades, but now it is finally within reach.” For now, the initial goals are “on-demand or near-real-time satellite imagery”, “tracking the entire theater of operations”, and “reliable broadband Internet access at remote forward operating bases”.