Thank you for changing the title, as I really cannot believe how deeply they buried that admission.<p>> Given these developments, we've decided not to design or build our own aircraft any longer, and to close our facility in Bridgwater.<p>It's literally one sentence, five paragraphs down, with a few more paragraphs afterwards.
I had to read this whole thing twice to find what it is all about.<p>A lot of self-congratulatory corporate speak there. I wish companies could just clearly state what is going on sometimes. Then I'm not surprised, this is Facebook...
Hah. The actual title, "High altitude connectivity: the next chapter" and the admission that the project is actually <i>shutting down</i> remind me of Google's corp-speak drenched blog post about Google Fiber, "Advancing our amazing bet": <a href="https://fiber.googleblog.com/2016/10/advancing-our-amazing-bet.html?m=1" rel="nofollow">https://fiber.googleblog.com/2016/10/advancing-our-amazing-b...</a>
The bridgwater team was based around the acquisition of a consultancy company 4 years ago:<p><a href="https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/mar/28/facebook-buys-uk-maker-solar-powered-drones-internet" rel="nofollow">https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/mar/28/facebook-...</a><p>I can’t find the exact story, but wasn’t there some recent news that they were mostly abandoning Free Basics/Internet.org? From what I can tell Free Basics seems to have been mostly a failure.
I helped them in some of their achievements mentioned there.<p>The amount of organizational ADD was staggering.<p>They could actually achieve things when they focused long enough to finish them, which was pretty rare.<p>They are kind of crazy people.<p>But they do have a lot of money to play with.
Anyone know how Project Loon is doing? It's been awhile since I've heard anything.<p><a href="https://x.company/loon/" rel="nofollow">https://x.company/loon/</a><p>It seemed similar.
I skimmed over that post. I had to go through it twice to see where they actually were admitting defeat. Was buried in the middle of the second to last paragraph.
Seems rational. I would not count on fb being abke to compete with fulltime airplane design companies when they started focusing on it. Fb instigated the market, others who are more capable are picking it up, so fb handed over the batton.
There is no mention of low-Earth orbit (LEO) satellite providers - SpaceX, OneWeb, Telesat, etc.<p>SpaceX in particular promises gigabit speeds with minimal (sub 35ms) latency and global coverage within a decade. Perhaps HAPS systems may play a minor role in providing coverage in developing areas, but will likely be leapfrogged by satellite coverage.
Now please let's do the same for Wired (and similar) - who not just present you with an opt-out tool designed to maximize the number of clicks you have to do, but they even admit <i>in the tool</i> that half of their partners are not even possible to opt-out of.
This is definitely an instance of burying the lead. Perhaps the audience isn’t HN, rather it’s the engineers they want to keep engaged after their project got sacked.
wow... what happened to hacker ethos? Facebook has hired the executive BSers who are expert at buryieng actual news in a single line deep in the pile of executive bullshitting. For me that's the real news here than closing down Aquila.
Iridium has finished launching their Low Earth Orbit satellite system using SpaceX's Falcon 9 <a href="http://www.spacex.com/news/2018/05/22/iridium-6grace-fo-mission" rel="nofollow">http://www.spacex.com/news/2018/05/22/iridium-6grace-fo-miss...</a>