In the beginning of 2021, Alphabet shuttered Loon. It was a familiar story within the annals of Google X history: an ambitious moonshot with tremendous upside that sputtered out prior to gaining any sort of meaningful traction after nearly a decade. “Despite Loon’s extraordinary technical progress,” X explains with a tinge of melancholy on the former project’s page, “the path to commercial viability proved much longer and riskier than hoped, so in 2021 Loon’s journey came to an end.” The project utilized weather balloons to deliver high-speed internet to spots that lack infrastructure such as Sub-Saharan Africa. Loon drummed up a good bit of interest and saw use in the wake of natural disasters like the hurricane that devastated Puerto Rico back in 2017. Some of Loon’s fundamental technologies live on in other Alphabet project. Its spirit, meanwhile, is maintained by Airbus through AALTO. Where Loon relied on balloons, however, the newer project utilizes Zephyr solar-powered drones. “[Loon] got really good customer engagement,”  AALTO CEO Samer Halawi told TechCrunch in a sit-down interview last week …