Did any of their moonshots really hit the mark or even come close?
And this is where I think google (and many big companies) fail. Technologically, Loons worked. I did not believe it when I read about those, but looking at the trajectories in public ADS-B data (those balloons self-advertise) it is clear that they move as designed, doing 2D positioning using only vertical control and can stay afloat for months. Wow! Mission accomplished. But commercially, nothing happened.
I do not know if it was because business types were not sold on it and did not build a commercial case; did the technical team simply live in their own bubble not talking to the outside; something else? But a 10-year "moonshot" project that pans out technologically and fails commercially indicates that the right hand ("internal VC") does not know or care what the left hand (techies) is doing, which is the problem at the company. My 2c.
Selling stolen technology you tried to patent from under the company you suckered into believing into buyout, and then having those patents stripped by the Judge might have something to do with it.
Occasionally starting moonshots as "high risk, uncertain reward" is OK for a short time, but if there is no clear reward on success after a year or two it might be continued as a PR or a charity, but not a moonshot. My 2c.
Per their wiki article:
> Astro Teller has said that Google Brain paid for the entire cost of Google X
even assuming that Waymo has zero expected future profitability.
My own personal image of X was that if you had to drive to some old Air Force base to see it, it was X. Since brain was software, it doesn’t fit the model.
Brain is also a much more general organization. They do things like develop Tensorflow, which is one of two most popular ML frameworks in the world (and until recently was far and away the most popular), and TPUs, which are ML-dedicated ASICs that have a huge impact on training and inference.
Both orgs are world class and historically important, and they certainly overlap, but they aren't replacements for one another.
That's about Google's entire revenue for 2020. I don't think even Google could put a man on the moon at those rates. Literal moonshots are expensive.
So it wouldn't be insubstantial, but they could fund a similar effort if they really wanted to. Shareholders would have a thing or two to say about that though, which is why Elon Musk is keeping SpaceX private.
Yes, if it were possible to go from zero to moon in one year then that would be all of Google revenue. But spread over 10 years that's just 10% per year.
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/apollo-11-moon-landing-how-much...
as a percentage of the yearly federal budget, it's not that extreme.
I believe the DoD budget (entirely non-NASA) is presently running around 700 billion a year.
some very quick searching tells me the total federal budget is something like 3500 billion a year. 4.4% of that would be 154bn a year.
Edit: The specific number is under 2 millisievert per day. And "One sievert carries with it a 5.5% chance of eventually developing fatal cancer based on the linear no-threshold model."
But wow what a drawn-out load of nothing a mission like that would be.
Uh... don't count your Mars shots before they're hatched. Even getting robot probes to Mars is very very hard. Only about half of Mars missions have been successful. In fact, since the fall of the Soviet Union only one organisation has succeeded in putting working probes on the Martian surface: NASA/JPL.
I don't think it's impossible that SpaceX will get there, but certainly not soon and not for "a few billion". If they succeed at all, it will require drawing on years on investment and expertise by NASA.
https://mars.nasa.gov/mars-exploration/missions/historical-l...
And SpaceX will soon have the capability to do it with zillion times less. Seems like if you really want to make it possible, you can.
More like "if the hard groundwork has been done 60 years ago". It's not as if SpaceX had to quite literally invent the orbital rocket.
So after 60 years of manned spaceflight, 9 manned lunar missions, and 30 years of flying reusable crewed vehicles with a space station that has been permanently crewed since 1998 someone better do it MUCH more cheaply.
The culprit isn't just "space is hard" - it's decades of cost-plus contracts and heavy government involvement that kept costs high and results low.
I prefer to think of a moonshot as longer than a longshot, whatever that might be worth.
It sure is sad though, coming from the acquisition before Google X that had just so many great players throughout.
No Saturn V rocket ever failed.
But unfortunate though that was, it didn't represent a fundamental uncertainty in the achievability of the goal - simply a fatal engineering mistake, which was immediately rectified.
It certainly seems like Google's most likely moon shot to take off. But considering only a few thousand people have used it, it's not exactly a big success.
That point of mine now has me wondering what Waymo will look like in 10-20 years’ time when autonomous vehicles become both ubiquitous and un-cool because it’s nothing new anymore (just like how Facebook is un-cool today). Will Waymo’s maintainers be adding new features that benefit the consumer, or will there be pressure to “monetise” it from every angle? And to what extent will brand-conscious automakers go to hide the fact they’re using Waymo, e.g. will they insist on rebranding it - not just for themselves, but between their own sub-brands (e.g. Ford vs Lincoln, or VW and Audi)?
It’s not a moonshot, it’s an absolute necessity.
If one remote operator can supervise 10 mostly autonomous vehicles, you've gotten 90% of the economic value of full autonomy.
That's not to say you shouldn't dream big (it's a moonshot after all). But there are plenty of reasons to think it won't be viable even if they can solve the technical challenges, and that much still isn't even clear yet.
Customer support is also going to be far far fewer than one person per vehicle.
The enormous amounts of data? If it's not valuable they can just discard it! Having sensors attached to something doesn't obligate you to store it forever.
Everyone knows the software/configuration costs are immense here. But that's the lion's share of the difficulty, and there's no reason to act like minor hurdles are bigger than they are.
I'm curious what the legal requirements for this will be. But I imagine they'd want to hold on to data of driving scenarios for at least a month, in case they get accused of wrongdoing by other drivers. If they had no data to back up their case with all those sensors, it would look awfully suspicious and essentially one witness against nobody - so they'd have to hold onto the data for however long the legal teams deem is okay.
This may sound crazy, but it's already happening at the scale of testing with just a few dozen cars.
https://arstechnica.com/cars/2018/06/gm-settles-with-motorcy...
Though enough data to disprove a hit and run wouldn't actually take up very much space. Medium-resolution camera views and some acceleration data? Sure, pop a single SSD in there and it'll hold more than a month's logs.
Source: https://www.reddit.com/r/SelfDrivingCars/comments/e8bfse/way...
The real world is full of edge cases - cameras fogging up, proximity sensors confused by ice buildup, thick fog limiting visibility, sun low on the horizon blinding the cameras, badly marked construction sites, black ice, line markers under snow, potholes, slush, contradictory traffic signs, deep puddles, worn out ruts, suicidal wildlife, road debris, etc. etc.
Wrt. moonshots - one need to have huge political capital inside the company to carry the high risk of large investment. I.e. one has to be Jobs or Musk. Even Yang failed. How Nadella succeeded it is kind of a miracle. It looks like there are no people of that caliber at Google these days, and without it you have a CFO touting "investing for long term" which in CFO mind obviously means investment like buying real estate and not a technology moonshot.
Was there really ever anything more?
When the US took a moon shot, we actually made it to the dann moon. It was very expensive and risky and lives were lost. But we committed ourselves and accomplished the goal no matter what it took.
I hope that these Alphabet projects aren't just pr / recruiting investments disguised as big ideas about the future.
The technology worked. It was, in fact, totally possible to build solar-powered, balloon-borne LTE base stations that provided internet access directly to handheld phones.
But in the end, it was just a fundamentally flawed idea. Satellites don't pop and fall out of the sky. Balloons do, frequently.
> But in the end, it was just a fundamentally flawed idea. Satellites don't pop and fall out of the sky. Balloons do, frequently.
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-alphabet-loon/alphabet-sh...
>>>
Rich DeVaul, a founder of the project who is no longer with Alphabet, said surging demand for mobile connectivity made towers cost-effective in more of the world than he had estimated a decade ago, diminishing the need for Loon. “The problem got solved faster than we thought,” he said in an interview.
It's really hard to be a public company and to take big risks like this. The Apollo Program never would have worked as a startup or public company.
I personally had hoped they told analysts that taking large bets for often no financial outcome is just who Alphabet are - but they folded to the Wall St pressure
The space program's history is very different from what most people imagine it to have been.
You're right that Kennedy was ambivalent about it, and that working with the USSR was floated, but ultimately he did decide to go ahead with it. And there were people opposed, but "extremely unpopular" doesn't sound right. Like, I think the majority of the population was broadly in favor.
She does say this quite a bit!
I just choked on my Tea. Did you perhaps miss the fact they stole Loon technology from a company they were in talks of acquiring? got sued, lost, and finally quietly settled?
https://www.wired.com/story/the-lawsuit-that-could-pop-alpha...
https://www.law.com/therecorder/2019/07/29/google-settles-ip...
it’s just corporate PR so people can fawn over them like your post and want to work there or use their products
Capturing eyeballs and mindshare before anyone else can is hardly charitable. It was 100% for the benefit of themselves, and everyone knows it. Facebook have tried the same scam.