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