Google is launching about 30 of the superpressure balloons from New Zealand from where they will drift around the world in near space on a controlled path. An Orlando-based firm, World Surveillance Group, sells similar equipment to the US Army and other government agencies. http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-22905199 Google calls the effort Project Loon and acknowledges it is “highly experimental”. Google aims to fly the balloons in the stratosphere, 20km (12 miles) or more above the ground, which is about double the altitude used by commercial aircraft and above controlled airspace.

It’s pretty hard to get the internet to lots of parts of the world,” Richard DeVaul, chief technical architect at Google[x] – the division behind the scheme. “The idea behind Loon was that it might be easier to tie the world together by using what it has in common – the skies – than the process of laying fibre and trying to put up cellphone infrastructure.

The balloons will communicate with Google’s “mission control” where computer servers will carry out the calculations needed to keep them on track, monitored by a small number of engineers.