this post was submitted on 19 Oct 2026
57 points (98.3% liked)

Technology

88899 readers
2608 users here now

This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.

Our Rules

  1. Follow the lemmy.world rules.
  2. Only tech related news or articles.
  3. Be excellent to each other!
  4. Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
  5. Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
  6. Politics threads may be removed.
  7. No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
  8. Only approved bots from the list below, this includes using AI responses and summaries. To ask if your bot can be added please contact a mod.
  9. Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
  10. Accounts 7 days and younger will have their posts automatically removed.

Approved Bots

founded 3 years ago
MODERATORS
L3s@lemmy.world
enu@lemmy.world
technopagan@lemmy.world
L4s@lemmy.world
L3s@hackingne.ws
57
Stratospheric airship flew from US to Japan and back (arstechnica.com)
submitted 4 hours ago by derrickoswald@sh.itjust.works to c/technology@lemmy.world
3 comments fedilink hide all child comments
 

It seems with an unmanned airship they should be using hydrogen for the ~8% increased payload capacity.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[โ€“] tomatolung@sopuli.xyz 5 points 1 hour ago (1 children)

Not that this is an amazing article, but the question is, how is this different than Loon and more likely to succeed? Loon LLC CEO Alastair Westgarth said the company could not find a way "to get the costs low enough to build a long-term, sustainable business"

This was the company that not only deployed high altitude stratosphere balloons, but managed to map high altitude wind currents at the point where they could navigate balloons without propulsion systems and used LTE to successfully cover various parts of the Earth.

My guess would be a Japanese government subsidy.

[โ€“] SillyDude@lemmy.zip 2 points 57 minutes ago

They're a relic of the preAI tech boom and vestergaurd, the same guy that does lifestraw, has enough money and connections to go for a long time without any feasibility. Sunk cost.