To the Stratosphere

[Applause]

just a sec sorry i gotta

get this uh we’ll get to that in a

moment all right

so this is a story about how

an idea that probably sounds ridiculous

on paper

might just save you from a global

catastrophe that you probably didn’t

know you needed to worry about

and i’m an engineer so for me this is a

story about how sometimes

the best solutions and the most simple

solutions aren’t always the most obvious

solutions

and uh that’s what i’m here to talk

about and we’ll open that up in a bit so

first

imagine you’re you’re sitting on an

airplane you’re about three quarters of

the way through your flight you open

that little

pack of peanuts that they gave you and

you’re eating a few of them and the ding

comes on it’s like hey we’re getting

ready to land

stewardess is coming down and maybe

you’re watching tv

you know they got satellite tv on these

airplanes a little seat back screen now

and it starts to flicker a little bit

not sure what’s up with that but you

don’t really think take another handful

of peanuts and pretty soon the lights

start to flicker and if you’re up in the

cockpit

the instruments go dark the airplane

starts to do this thing

you know it’s bad news right

it’s a bad situation all right so so

what happened what do you think went

wrong

in this situation probably not probably

not going where you expect with this

so what what about this uh coronal

mass ejection is what this is called you

probably know that

solar flare is another term this is a

pretty big one uh from about 2012

it’s a nasa footage it’s pretty cool

that they can take these kind of

pictures right

so this thing blasts out of the sun and

it’s racing toward the earth

and along with that that matter from the

sun

here it comes isn’t that great and uh

along with that matter from the sun

is radiation right there’s there’s

electromagnetic radiation coming at you

and what what does this do so if you

guys have seen ocean’s eleven

uh that there’s that part where they set

off the emp right all the lights in

vegas go out

i’m not sure that thing really exists

but that’s the idea right that’s that’s

what happens

and at a high level this is a real

phenomenon right this happens every day

i think most of you probably

know that this is a thing but you don’t

really worry about it because it hasn’t

really

affected your life right but it can and

i’m not just talking about

maybe and what could happen um in 1859

there was something called the

carrington event it was a

very large solar flare that came racing

across towards earth and

and when it got here it wreaked havoc

with some things it made some pretty

lights in the sky but also people who

were

sitting at telegraph keys got blown out

of their chairs by the radiation that

got picked up

i mean it’s a real thing and that was a

time where electronics and

electricity at all really were not

exactly used quite as much as they are

today

i bet most of you have some pretty

complicated electronic devices in your

pocket right now right so

if this were to happen again and it

could this is just statistics it

can happen we could have a lot of

serious problems um the airplane falling

out of the sky is probably an extreme

example

but what’s a lot more likely is is

impact on satellites right they’re out

in space

they don’t have the protection of the

earth’s atmosphere to keep that

radiation away

so satellites maybe doesn’t sound like

that big of a deal but probably stop and

think about how often you interact with

the satellite every day you don’t

probably think about it but you punch up

an address on your phone and it

tells you where to go that’s using gps

satellites you turn your radio on in a

newer car it’s probably coming through

from satellite

if you live in a more remote area you

might get internet or you know phone the

way you

you stay in touch with your family is

used through satellites

so this is something that would have a

pretty big impact on society as a whole

if it happened and it’s

something that’s probably worth

preparing for right

so what are we going to do about it so

i’m here to tell you about one solution

not the only solution but this is one i

work on and so i’m excited about it

right

so this this solution i’m gonna try to

walk you through this and it hopefully

it won’t get too techy for you but

there’s four key technologies that make

this up

um so we’ll talk through them real quick

the first one is

called uh sailing so you’ve probably

heard of this one it’s been around for a

while you

put something up in the air like a sheet

or something like that right and it

carries you somewhere

a lot of things can move in the air with

wind blowing on them so i think i

probably don’t have to explain this one

very much um the next one is

is uh weather forecasting now this has

also been around for a while i mean i

think there was a

time where you put the rock outside the

cave right and if the rock is wet you

know it’s raining

but we’ve come a long ways from that

time right

and so the kind of stuff we’ve been

doing really only in the last hundred

years is numerical weather prediction

where we

we take measurements all around the

earth we put all that together we do

some math we try to predict where air is

moving through the sky and we use that

to tell

you know is it going to rain tomorrow

and things like that and and that can be

pretty serious right if

if it’s going to rain tomorrow may not

matter that much but if you need to

prepare because of hurricanes racing

across the ocean right that’s probably a

big deal you’re glad you have that

and then the last one here that i’m

going to talk about is

machine learning so if you work in a

technology field and you give

some kind of a technology talk and you

don’t use machine learning you’re doing

something wrong in this day and age and

people will look down upon you but

there is actually an application for

machine learning here there’s

data coming together and we’re using

that technology so we’ll talk about how

in a little bit

so those are the first three so now the

uh the fourth thing i’ve got for a

technology is inside this box here

and uh you never know if you should do

an actual

technical demo live there’s always

things that can go wrong but i’m gonna

give it a shot so bear with me

so i just gotta

keep these things protected you know uh

yeah

so there we go

this uh this is a talk about balloons i

don’t know if you were expecting that if

you read the brochure i might have given

it away but

that’s what we’re going to talk about

for the rest of this section maybe not

what you would have expected i brought a

visual i think most of you probably

would have known what a balloon was

already but

um wanted to be a helper

so uh this is this is a great thing to

laugh about and i

i still think it’s crazy this is

something i get to work on but there’s

serious business to be done here this is

something

that serious companies are putting money

into and a real solution to this problem

so

people like nasa loon if you follow

that’s a spin out of google

project google’s incubator lab

the department of defense and raven

industries which is where i work here in

town there’s

me and about 35 engineers that eat sleep

and breathe balloon technology every day

sounds pretty exciting doesn’t it

everyone loves the balloon guy so

what do we do with the balloon to

stop you from falling out of the sky on

the airplane it might sound like a

stretch but there really is a story here

in it and it’s legitimate so

i’m going to talk you through it and

maybe with a little less humor and a

little more tech now

so hopefully your eyes don’t roll back

in your head so

these are these are balloons but they’re

serious balloons they’re not like this

balloon obviously

um these are large complicated balloons

that can

carry hundreds of pounds um they fly for

you know two three hundred days at a

time up in the sky in the stratosphere

so

these balloons go up to say 70 to 90 000

feet

so if you’re on that jet liner you’re

maybe at 30

000 feet so we’re talking two three

times the altitude a jetliner is just

basically the edge of space the

atmosphere is about two percent

up there of what it is here where we’re

sitting um

and they’re they’re made of plastic film

you know just like

any other balloon this is uh

polyethylene like a

like a trash bag but a pretty thin trash

bag these these films are often like

0.8 mils which is a measure of thickness

trash bags are often two mils maybe even

four mils if you buy the you know the

hefty stretch kind that’s not going to

break when you’re carrying it out

and they weigh hundreds of pounds the

balloon itself so we’re talking about

a lot of plastic film these are large

balloons

so i’ve got a a video here of a balloon

lunch to kind of give you an idea so

that’s probably a 50 foot tall balloon

that’s one of the smaller ones

for doing this kind of thing and uh the

basic principle here is

is fairly straightforward it’s similar

to the one

at play on stage here helium likes to go

up so you put helium inside of plastic

and

the plastic goes up and then the stuff

that it’s carrying goes up too

um so that’s that’s kind of an idea of

what they look like at launch

because they go up so high and into so

low pressure when they get to altitude

they fill out they’re more shaped like a

pumpkin so

if you haven’t seen one from looking at

uh any of the scientific stuff or google

stuff i’ve got a

flattering picture of myself with a

balloon here to give you a sense of

scale

that’s actually taken in a hanger and

that hanger is about 65

70 feet tall so just to give you an idea

how big that is

i could have gone and stood under it but

then you wouldn’t get that great cameo

effect

um so that’s that’s a that’s probably a

65 70 foot balloon right there this is

technology that requires design we

wouldn’t put 35 engineers on building

one of those obviously

um but it’s it’s some serious work um

and and then what do we do with the

balloon so it’s all good and well that

we saw the balloon go up and there’s

some electronics hanging down there and

it’s

floating through the sky and that’s all

pretty nice and all that and then what

just

flies away and ends up in the ocean

somewhere that that probably wouldn’t be

very useful and it wouldn’t solve the

problem i was promising to solve right

so the concept that we leverage at this

point going back to the weather

prediction

is wind steering so these balloons are

like that sailboat they don’t have any

propulsion

they float freely in the wind but we can

move the balloon up and down by pumping

ballast in and out of the balloon

and there are wind currents at different

altitudes that take the balloons in

different directions so you see this

nice is obviously an animation but

imagine at this lower altitude there’s a

wind layer that’s generally going the

path of balloon

and then you want to turn the balloon to

the right a little bit if you know that

that other altitude

has got winds that are going in the

direction you want you can move the

balloon up

catch that wind just like running a

sailboat but in three dimensions right

so why is this complicated and and

what’s hard about it well

it turns out that people who forecast

what the weather is doing

don’t generally care what’s happening at

80 000 feet they

care if it’s going to rain tomorrow

that’s what you care about

and that’s where the machine learning is

some of those things and you know the

special sauce of the deal comes in is

we have to be able to figure out what’s

happening up in layers of altitude where

there’s really no model for that

and so we’re taking in the weather

layers we’re taking in predictions and

measurements and things from satellites

but we’re also taking in

you know radiosondes that are released

around the country and then we’re taking

measurements from the balloon itself

and we use the machine learning just

fuse all that data together and try to

paint a picture that says

at these different altitudes these are

the directions the winds are going

and if you can do a good enough job of

that you can keep that balloon

kind of where you want to keep it so

imagine that you’re trying to replace a

satellite that’s gone

and you need to park the balloon

somewhere where you can receive the data

from it

you got to be able to do that you got to

be able to steer it so this is a

kind of an illustration of how that

works from the top down this is from a

flight we did about a week ago and

you see the red and green arrows appear

on the balloon that’s when it’s going up

and down in altitude

and you’ll see we kind of just meander

back and forth over

over the target there that’s the raven

launch facility north of sioux falls

and this whole time we’re within about

20 miles of

of that area so if you’re thinking about

some of the things you can do with this

gps signal or like feeding data to your

cell phone

20 miles is not that far in terms of an

rf signal right you’re 20 miles from the

radio tower most of the time you’re

receiving from it and so

you can do a lot with a platform that

can be within 20 miles of the target and

stay there

and the other thing to think about is

that’s a 24-hour clip

so there aren’t very many aircraft for

example that can park over an area for

24 hours they

run out of fuel and you have that thing

i was talking about at the start of the

talk right

um and same goes for satellites

satellites are great but we already

talked about solar flares but there’s

other things right satellites are

reasonably expensive i think everyone

has that sense getting something to

space

costs a lot of money um they’re

complicated it takes years to design one

these balloons we can be out of the box

and in the air in about two hours for

the first one

and maybe a half hour for each one after

that so if you’re trying to think about

testing things in space environments or

if you’re trying to think about cost

effectiveness or if you’re trying to

think about

responding to an emergency say that

solar flare thing i can get a lot of

balloons in the air pretty quickly and

try to recover from that situation

and it’s not that we don’t want to

launch gps satellites again but it’s

what do you do until then

and that’s a real application that

they’re being used for right now with

with project loon that i talked about

that’s the spin out of google

they’re doing communications where a

hurricane will come and knock place down

they don’t have communication anymore

and people are

trying to call their families right

they’re trying to say i’m safe or i need

help

and your cell phone doesn’t work right

that’s a pretty bad feeling

and they’re actually doing this right

now they’re bringing balloons in they’re

replacing those cell towers and they’re

keeping them there until

things are restored so it’s not just an

idea it’s it’s in practice

now one thing you might have noticed is

that when i showed that clip of the

balloon it’s kind of wandering back and

forth kind of looks like a drunk driver

running around up there

and you can’t really say okay i can park

this right here and fly a race track

like you could with an airplane

so if you expand that out to trying to

cover a whole country say

uh or maybe the state of south dakota i

need to be able to

know that i’m going to have coverage

across the state and i can’t necessarily

predict exactly where those winds are

going to be

so so what do you do about that well

these are fairly inexpensive platforms

and that’s where you move to a

constellation of balloons so you put

multiple balloons up and statistically

they’re all kind of wandering around but

overall you have the area covered

and this is also something that’s

happening today so i took this

screenshot off a public flight tracking

website two days ago so these are

google balloons loon balloons loon has

had 40 to 50 balloons in the air pretty

much continuously for the last five or

six years

some projects we’ve been working with

them on and you can see that there’s

areas of africa that they’re signed up

now to cover they provide

commercial service it’s relief for for

cell phones where there isn’t that

infrastructure

so that people can communicate and one

thing you can notice is

you kind of have a cluster of balloons

over the middle that are that are there

covering that area and then you have

some balloons off to the side

so that’s where the machine learning and

then the weather prediction comes in and

you say hey

in a few days i think there’s a decent

chance the winds are going to shift and

everything’s going to blow to the east

so then you go position some balloons

over the west to get ready for that

and if you can manage that intelligently

and that’s where kind of the science

comes in

you can provide continuous coverage and

provide that kind of service

this is something that isn’t necessarily

a strictly new idea

it might sound like it but you know like

we already talked about balloons have

been around for a long time

people have been doing stratospheric

high altitude balloons for over 100

years as well

and if you think back to like the 50s

when the space program was getting

started they were using them for lots of

things

one really interesting one i think is

they were trying to figure out with

these high-flying uh spy jets and stuff

that were going up to the edge of space

is

what do we do if the guy needs to eject

right that’s not a problem we’ve

we’ve necessarily solved before and so

they actually put a guy

a very brave test pilot under a balloon

they lifted him up to 75 000 feet

and he was the first guy to jump with

this new parachute that was supposed to

work

should go read about that if you want

it’s pretty crazy he uh

he actually got caught on the parachute

line he was spinning 120 revolutions per

second he passed out

and then eventually the secondary shoot

auto deployed and he woke up and

deployed the rest of the system and

steered himself to safety

that’s braver than i am for sure um but

this is not a new idea but why

so why are we talking about it why

haven’t we got balloons flying over the

country right now is it that it doesn’t

work

i think we just you know showed you that

it can work and it’s working right now

but

part of it is that whole data element

the machine learning the control

even the electronics you know being able

to process that data

on something that can go up on a balloon

and figure out what it wants to do

is a lot easier now than it used to be

um if there’s any kind of hobbyists or

tech people

you know do you know what people know

what this is this is a this is a

raspberry pi is what it’s called it’s 20

hobby computer that you can buy you know

off amazon and start playing with if

you’re into electronics

like i am and the the interesting thing

about it is if you compare that back to

the 50s when they started doing this

stuff

that this little computer that i can get

for 20 bucks has 500

000 times the amount of computational

power that the apollo 11 did

so there’s a lot more stuff we can do

now with a lot less weight and power and

space than there used to be

in addition to that if you look at solar

panels right nasa started using solar

panels on satellites in the 50s as it

has

as it goes as well as there’s a

satellite called vanguard 1 and those

solar panels were about 10 percent

efficient

we’re in the range of 90 something

percent efficient with solar technology

now so

there’s just a lot of enabling

technologies that have come together

the balloon part isn’t necessarily new

or different but a lot of other things

that have come together to make this

practical and make it work right now

so this is kind of how it works if you

want to imagine back to our solar flare

case you got your satellite up there and

something goes wrong right it

malfunctions you’ve got a solar flare

um it dies somehow so we go in there and

we take

the place where the satellite was

providing coverage and we bring the

balloons in

and those balloons have comms equipment

that can replace the signals that the

satellites were sending

and now you’ve got connections between

points on the ground again

there’s a lot of other things we can use

this for too the solar flare thing makes

a good opening for a story but that’s

obviously a rare occurrence

and we would hope not to see these used

in that way but there’s a lot of

anything you could use an airplane or a

satellite for think remote sensing

precision agriculture

monitoring crops providing comms we

talked about loon and how they’re

lighting up cell phones in places where

there was no infrastructure before

the disaster relief cases atmospheric

studies so there’s a lot of cool stuff

you can do with this

one of the ones that we’ve looked at

recently is infrared so

firefighters right if you want to know

where this wildfire is you may not have

a satellite parked right there

this is an infrared image that we took

from a balloon this year

and so if you can provide that balloon

up there station seeking over that fire

you can provide awareness to those

firefighters to know where they need to

go to do the next step in the battle

so there’s a lot of cool stuff that

comes out of this i mostly just wanted

to talk about that but if i have to

bring some

conclusions out of this because it’s

supposed to be a good packaged up talk

right

so one thing would be again if there’s

any engineers in the crowd

one of the lessons to learn from this

and that i’ve learned from this working

on it the last few years is

you know sometimes the best solution and

the simplest solution isn’t the obvious

solution so if you’re working on

something

and trying to think of ideas don’t don’t

throw things out because they might be

crazy

work it through sometimes things that

are in front of us don’t jump right out

at us

and then for those of you who aren’t

engineers but maybe

fly on airplanes the next time you’re on

an airplane you can just

think about balloons and you’ll you’ll

feel better about your life

uh and who knows you know the next solar

cycle peaks in about 2025

so maybe in a few years you’ll be

wanting to call the balloon guy

[Applause]

thanks