Blue Origin founder Jeff Bezos and Blue Origin CEO Bob Smith flank Telesat CEO Dan Goldberg, who’s holding a model of Blue Origin’s New Glenn rocket. (Blue Origin via Twitter)
Canada’s biggest satellite operator, Telesat, has signed agreements with Amazon billionaire Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin space venture and Alphabet’s Loon aerial telecommunications venture to support its future global broadband satellite constellation.
Blue Origin has agreed to provide multiple launches on its yet-to-be-built New Glenn rocket to get Telesat’s spacecraft into low Earth orbit, or LEO. Loon, meanwhile, will furnish a cloud-based data delivery platform that’s based on the system it currently uses to deliver mobile services via a fleet of high-altitude balloons.
Today’s announcements raise Telesat’s profile in a market battle that also involves California-based SpaceX and the international OneWeb consortium.
An experimental Wing drone takes flight in California. (Alphabet / Wing Photo)
Two of Google’s best-known flights of fancy, Project Loon and Project Wing, are being hatched from their X incubator to become independent businesses under the wing of Alphabet, Google’s holding company.
Loon will work with mobile network operators globally to bring internet access to a market of billions of people currently without high-speed connections.
Astro Teller, the “Captain of Moonshots” at Alphabet’s X idea factory, shows off two of X’s innovations: Google’s self-driving car, a venture that was spun off as Waymo; and the communications platform at far left that’s used on Project Loon’s balloons. (GeekWire Photo / Alan Boyle)
MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif. — Why does the Captain of Moonshots wear roller skates to work?
That may sound like the start of a joke, but Astro Teller provides a mostly serious answer at the complex that houses the think tank for Alphabet, Google’s parent company.
The inline skates help Teller, the captain who’s at the helm of what’s known as “X: The Moonshot Factory,” get between appointments in the 500,000-square-foot complex more quickly.
“This way I’m two minutes late as opposed to four minutes late,” he told GeekWire during a recent tour.
The clock is always ticking for Teller, and for X as well.
It’s not as if the idea of an idea factory was totally new when the Google X lab was founded in 2010. Microsoft Research has served a similar role for more than two decades. Bell Labs and IBM’s research centers go back decades further.
But today’s rapid pace of innovation and competition is increasing the pressure to turn blue-sky ideas into marketable products and services. No company, not even Alphabet, can afford to bet on every hunch. So X’s aim is to systematize the process of picking winning technologies.
“We are trying to be the card counters of innovation, not the gamblers of innovation,” Teller said.
Project Loon’s balloons are getting better at staying in one place. (Credit: Project Loon via YouTube)
Drones, satellites and rocket planes are all well and good for high-flying missions, but sometimes the best craft for the job is a balloon.
Google’s Project Loon, for example, is enlisting machine learning to pilot its experimental data-beaming balloons through the stratosphere. And other ventures are using high-altitude balloon platforms to conduct missions traditionally associated with suborbital rocket launches.
