Facebook abandons Aquila, its internet drone | Hacker News Reader

Facebook abandons Aquila, its internet drone

code.facebook.com

256 pointsajuhasz82 comments

Thank you for changing the title, as I really cannot believe how deeply they buried that admission.

> Given these developments, we've decided not to design or build our own aircraft any longer, and to close our facility in Bridgwater.

It's literally one sentence, five paragraphs down, with a few more paragraphs afterwards.

To distill the meaning further:

>Making an airplane happened to be harder than running a clickfarm

I had to read this whole thing twice to find what it is all about.

A lot of self-congratulatory corporate speak there. I wish companies could just clearly state what is going on sometimes. Then I'm not surprised, this is Facebook...

It reads almost like they choose to shutdown because the program itself is too successful. The irony.

Arguably they have to give some context for people that are not as deeply informed about that project as many HNers are. I don't think it's that bad to state the vision, progress and outcome before announcing they will not manufacture their own planes anymore.

Maybe it's a way to advertise what they've worked on in case someone reading it might want to contract with them, for corporate or military uses (whatever they may be, knowing they have built drones is definitely applicable to a range of projects).

Facebook doesn't bring anything of real value to the planets population but they are masters of appearing like they do.

They are a gossip magazine where people are the celebrities themselves. Useless.

Company hires more people => probability of critical human error rises => company introduces more processes and internal norms => the average individual in the company starts to feel less free => the culture shifts from "ask forgiveness" to "ask permission" => people start to think about what they can do wrong much more => it also applies to all outward communications.

I mean, it's not neccessarilly a bad thing: don't we all want to Facebook to be more responsible and cautious in what it does with our private data, for example? Of course we do. But company's culture is a non-separable thing, so we shouldn't be surprised by this corporate-speak from them now. Days of "I'm CEO, bitch" a long, long over.

I would be surprised if there wasn't corporate speak about it.

Honestly, if you were running the corporation would you just boil it down to "We stopped building our Internet airplane thingy. Sorry y'all" ?

That's pretty much the first line I would write. And then I would continue explaining. If you can have both, start with honesty and not wasting people's time. You'll be more likely to earn it.

There is plenty of honest closure notices, generally along the lines of "lessons learned", "goodbye", and such.

Or an honest post-mortem that explains the shortcomings of the proposed aircraft concept: design, aerodynamics, autonomous stationkeeping, RF comms, logistics, or whatever.

The current trend of publishing positive results but completely hiding negative results is deeply harming to research and engineering, since it doesn't allow future attempts to learn from previous mistakes.

Wouldn't the shutdown be the thesis of the memo?

...don't catch you slippin' now

Hah. The actual title, "High altitude connectivity: the next chapter" and the admission that the project is actually shutting down remind me of Google's corp-speak drenched blog post about Google Fiber, "Advancing our amazing bet": https://fiber.googleblog.com/2016/10/advancing-our-amazing-b...

haha - right out of the Veridian Dynamics playbook :)

edit: see also - Jabberwocky http://www.veridian-dynamics.org/jabberwocky.php

Thanks for the link. I like their disclaimer:

>Here at Veridian Dynamics, we care about you. That's why, by visiting this site, you agree to suspend all of your rights. Because we care.

That was such a great show!

For those wondering, Veridian Dynamics is the fictional company where the show “Better off Ted” is set in. https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1235547/

It's not exactly shutting down, they are shifting priorities away from manufacturing their own planes as they realised that other have caught up and they can just buy the things. They seem to still be working on the main vision, connecting more people (and future customers) to the internet.

That's not the case though, they are shifting to external vendors rather than developing their own aircraft.

That's the same as shutting down.

Well, not really. It's more like Apple going into partnership with VW for their self-driving car project. Building a production vehicle is a massive distraction from the core project (ie. the self-driving software).

Nah, Google also did the same with its End-to-End encryption extension for Gmail.

They "didn't abandon it", they just "allowed the community to take it from there".

Yeah, so they abandoned it.

The "it" they abandoned is the aircraft, they will continue to work on connectivity. They mention working with Airbus, they have a drone that has stayed aloft for 14 days. It seems like FB decided that they weren't making enough progress on building their own aircraft to justify not using someone else's technology for that piece of the overall project.

The bridgwater team was based around the acquisition of a consultancy company 4 years ago:

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/mar/28/facebook-...

I can’t find the exact story, but wasn’t there some recent news that they were mostly abandoning Free Basics/Internet.org? From what I can tell Free Basics seems to have been mostly a failure.

Maybe this? https://www.engadget.com/2018/05/02/facebook-free-basics-qui...

There is also this from 2016 - https://www.computerworld.com/article/3032646/internet/the-s...

So even if Free Basics "sites" were actual sites on the Internet (which they're not), it would be 0.00000005 percent of the web. The real Internet is at least 20 million times bigger than Facebook's fake Internet. It's like McDonald's giving a poor person a free sesame seed and claiming credit for giving them a free Big Mac. The other important difference for Facebook is that Free Basics offers a version of the "web" without any of Facebook's competitors.

It was overly obvious capitalist “altruism washing”. If they had just come out to say directly that they wanted to provide free internet so that they could monopolize emerging undeveloped markets it might have been better received.

*if they had just offered bags of cash to local politicians in exchange for access to their constituents (like the US), this would've been a raging success.

Don't underestimate how much PR is for persuading internal decision makers as much as the public. To outright admit the goal may make little difference to the public, but it might doom the project internally, with the board, or limit its ability to recruit talent cheaper.

There's a lot of interesting research surrounding corporate responsibility policies and how they aid recruiting and may affect productivity of workers.

Hmmm, I wonder if the golden handcuffs all fell off at 4 years, and everybody who was part of creating the project and technology has cashed out and left?

I helped them in some of their achievements mentioned there.

The amount of organizational ADD was staggering.

They could actually achieve things when they focused long enough to finish them, which was pretty rare.

They are kind of crazy people.

But they do have a lot of money to play with.

What could they have done better?

They are sort of a skunkworks lab. So it's natural to abandon lots of ideas after a short time.

Trouble is that they even abandon their wild ideas that work.

Everyone involved felt like all the middle managers were on a mission to impress Zuck and not much else.

What did we all do before middle managers were invented?

New skunkworks project:

Create new org role (and matching business school curriculum) for communication and synthesis, rather than hierarchical packet filtering.

Anyone know how Project Loon is doing? It's been awhile since I've heard anything.

https://x.company/loon/

It seemed similar.

Google balloons still show up on ASD-B (aircraft transponder tracking) from time to time, but beyond that I dunno.

Yup, I saw one floating over Georgia recently. It floated over from the Caribbean.

It looks like they're actively hiring to commercialize Loon, which seems like a good sign:

https://careers.google.com/jobs#!t=jo&jid=/x/head-of-supply-...

> Preferred qualifications:

> Have taken a telecommunications product or aerospace product from concept to mass production

They appear on https://www.flightradar24.com/ once in a while. 3 in Northern Nevada right now.

Not very well. They had a short span during the hurricane disasters where they got publicity, but they face a lot of the same problems: spectrum, movement, and small coverage areas.

my initial reaction to this news was "oh good, now Google can cancel Loon without feeling like they lost to Facebook"

If Musk launches his satellite data mesh, would loon still have a place?

With current designs, Musks satellies need special ground stations to communicate with. They can't beam internet direct to your phone.

Loon can connect direct to your phone.

Both will require a fairly decent set of base stations so the balloon/satellite itself can connect to the internet.

That's hard to tell at this point.

From a pure physics standpoint, loon should be able to outperform satellites in urban areas and in receiver cost. I'm sceptical if that is enough to justify the project, but we don't know how Musk's satellites will perform yet

Arguably no, but lets see if Musks plans are more than PR speak to build up hype. Right now, Google is way ahead.

They made a major advance in the last couple of years by integrating real-time wind data to the flight planning. The baloons can 'loiter' much better now by changing altitude to drift back and forth over an area of interest.

Here is some info from my observations of the Google Loon activity out of Winnemucca, Nevada...

https://desertfog.org/projects/project-loon/launch-activity/

I skimmed over that post. I had to go through it twice to see where they actually were admitting defeat. Was buried in the middle of the second to last paragraph.

Seems rational. I would not count on fb being abke to compete with fulltime airplane design companies when they started focusing on it. Fb instigated the market, others who are more capable are picking it up, so fb handed over the batton.

how often does a company build entire research and development facilities and lobby regulators and be the first movers... just to instigate a market? If competition is the problem they’re not even acquiring a single company? And if it’s just insufficient tech instead of worry over competition, Facebook usually has no problem acquiring what it can’t develop. They even acquired oculus to step into VR. It would appear that there’s more to it than just that.

They didn't want to make an Internet drone. They wanted to make a Facebook drone. When Facebook Internet.org failed, this was sure to follow.

I think it would be difficult for Facebook to acquire Airbus :) http://www.airbus.com/defence/uav/zephyr.html

There is no mention of low-Earth orbit (LEO) satellite providers - SpaceX, OneWeb, Telesat, etc.

SpaceX in particular promises gigabit speeds with minimal (sub 35ms) latency and global coverage within a decade. Perhaps HAPS systems may play a minor role in providing coverage in developing areas, but will likely be leapfrogged by satellite coverage.

Facebook might still be salty with the Falcon 9’s rapid unscheduled disassembly on the pad with their communications satellite onboard.

“Facebook has expressed disappointment in the loss of its Amos-6 communication satellite. The satellite was supposed to deliver broadband internet access to remote locations in Africa as part of the internet.org initiative. Facebook and satellite provider Eutelsat spent $95 million to license satellite’s Ka-band communications array for five years. The satellite is owned by Israel-based Spacecom.”

https://www.extremetech.com/extreme/234845-spacex-falcon-9-e...

Would launch insurance cover this? I know it exists but I’m not familiar with how it works so maybe someone can correct me.

Insurance did cover the loss, but by its marine cargo policy, not the launch insurance.

That of course doesn’t cover the opportunity cost of Facebook not having its satellite in orbit.

https://mobile.twitter.com/pbdes/status/771410879770456064

https://space.stackexchange.com/questions/18011/was-amos-6-i...

There have been news about most of these. In general, they're all late. SpaceX was the last I saw that publicly stated the problem was harder than they expected, and it will be delayed an unknown amount.

They launched a couple of test articles 4 months ago. One might expect they're taking data and iterating.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16438716#16439996

They originally said they were launching the constellation back in 2019. New estimates as of yesterday say the first 800 in 2020/2021. Not to mention they have to launch half within 6 years to retain their license from the FCC. And Boeing's Leo looks like it was cancelled/never started:

http://spacenews.com/boeing-constellation-stalled-spacex-con...

I have a hard time believing these can compete with wireless for anything but the most remote areas.

Now please let's do the same for Wired (and similar) - who not just present you with an opt-out tool designed to maximize the number of clicks you have to do, but they even admit in the tool that half of their partners are not even possible to opt-out of.

This is definitely an instance of burying the lead. Perhaps the audience isn’t HN, rather it’s the engineers they want to keep engaged after their project got sacked.

> This is definitely an instance of burying the lead. Perhaps the audience isn’t HN, rather it’s the engineers they want to keep engaged after their project got sacked.

As an engineer, having to parse a bunch of corpspeak to extract the buried lede that my project was canned is not going to keep me engaged. If they want to keep people engaged, they need to be clear and upfront about what's happening now and what's happening next.

I worked at a company that hid a layoff announcement in a self-congratulatory email about positive quarterly financial results. I wasn't personally laid off, but communicating in that way lowered my opinion of the executive management.

Good point. There’s a fine line between a pep talk and losing credibility.

Do Facebook have any patents on HAPS technology? If so, are they going to make a patent grant so anyone else can use them?

wow... what happened to hacker ethos? Facebook has hired the executive BSers who are expert at buryieng actual news in a single line deep in the pile of executive bullshitting. For me that's the real news here than closing down Aquila.

Here is the post on AirBus partnership by same guy. Again virtually information-less and 99% full of corp-speak. Can't believe such a corporate suit is FB's director of engineering of all things. Is Zuck finally not recognizing talent anymore?

https://code.facebook.com/posts/2265698886989780/facebook-an...

Also the fact that they should rightfully be ashamed about shutting down this moonshot. It's super amusing that these companies are sitting on billions of dollars that they don't know what to do with and essentially running hedge fund instead of investing for next technical breakthroughs. My guess is that guys working on this project have moved on and no one else has enough passion to run it. But seriously, I can think of two dozen folks who would be happy to dedicate their lives to this project. Saying that aerospace is companies would take u the slack is pure fantasy given tight budgets and general lack of risk tacking there.

Iridium has finished launching their Low Earth Orbit satellite system using SpaceX's Falcon 9 http://www.spacex.com/news/2018/05/22/iridium-6grace-fo-miss...

It's not finished yet and Iridium will never be cheap enough for the developing world.

Does anyone know why opting aircrafts instead of satellites ?

Because satellite internet already exists and apparently didn't fully solve the problem.

Better satellite internet would help. But the best way to do that is to fly the satellites lower, which means you need a lot more of them. Unless you happen to own the cheapest space launch service on the market that's hard to do, so only Elon Musk is really pursuing that path.

Aircraft on the other hand are kind of like really close satellites that are cheap to refuel. Satellites (that aren't geostationary) are all or nothing: you either cover the entire globe or it isn't very useful. Other aircraft are easy to keep over one select area

Geostationary satellites are a long way away. Twice as far out as GPS satellites. You need a big dish to communicate with them.

Rockets Expensive.

Somewhere the Eye of Zauron is watching...

Possible fallout from Brexit. Not much point in global companies setting up shop in the UK these days.

Really? How did you come to that conclusion?

Because the country has humiliated itself on the world stage, proved to be run by a scabby band of self interested morons and half populated by backwards facing gullable isolationists, willing to burn 50 years of hard won progress and risk destablishing Europe, just at the point where we face huge global environmental and economic challenges, at a time when it’s clear that working togther is of paramount importance.

Just a guess :)

Yea, the USA is in bad shape now, but I think the OP was talking about the UK. ;)

As Airbus and BMW have recently pointed out, nobody can say what the customs regime is going to be in either direction. Nobody can say what the immigration regime is going to be either, but there are hints that it will be even more onerous.

And that's without considering the less likely but still possible disaster scenarios of the government's own planning: https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/brexit-no-dea...

Why using aircrafts instead of satellite?

Why not satellites instead of aircrafts?

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