Google parent Alphabet’s broadband venture Project Loon has officially burst after almost a decade of trying and failing to take flight, due to problems making the helium-propelled, solar-powered technology commercially available. The overinflated Loon was launched as a means of delivering internet access to remote and underserved areas using large steerable balloons in the stratosphere. These were designed to provide wider coverage than terrestrial base stations, in order to reach remote locations, but with far lower cost and complexity than a satellite solution. However, it seems that balloon (or stratellite) solutions are being squeezed between low cost approaches to rural cellular build-out, such as Facebook’s OpenCellular, and the increasingly affordable and deployable low earth orbit (LEO) satellites. And while the…