Google parent Alphabet has two new businesses under its name. The firm announced on Wednesday that it's'graduating' Project Loon and Project Wing from moonshots to full-fledged businesses at Alphabet. Project Loon, its internet-bearing balloon initiative, and Project Wing, its drone delivery service, were launched in 2013 and 2014, respectively, as part of its research-and-development lab Google X. Alphabet's Google X announced on Wednesday that its moonshots Project Loon and Project Wing would'graduate' to full companies. Now, Loon and Wing will be included in Alphabet's'Other Bets' category, which includes former Google X moonshots like deep learning research project Google Brain, life sciences research arm Verily as well as self-driving car startup Waymo, among others. The CEO of Loon will be Alastair Westgarth, former CEO of antenna company Quintel, while longtime Google employee James Ryan Burgess is the CEO of Wing, Google X head Astro Teller announced in a blog post.

Google parent company Alphabet's internet-delivering balloon service and its drone delivery project have graduated from X programs to full-fledged businesses at Alphabet. From here, Alphabet says that Loon will maintain its mission of working with carriers worldwide to deliver internet to underserved areas. Wing will similarly continue building out its network of delivery UAVs, not to mention its air-traffic control system for the unmanned aircraft. And since the companies are their own entities now, they each have an official leader. Alastair Westgarth will serve as CEO of Loon, while James Ryan Burgess will fill the same role at Wing.

At 6:40 in the morning, a klaxon horn sounds three times. "Gas!" a man in a hard hat and fluorescent vest yells out. There's a hissing noise, and the helium starts flowing. From the tanks stacked like cordwood on a nearby truck, the gas moves through a series of hoses until it's 55 feet up, then through a copper pipe and into the top of a plastic tube that hangs down to the ground, like a shed snake skin held up for inspection. It's a Wednesday in late June in Winnemucca, a solitary mining town in northern Nevada that has avoided oblivion by straddling the I-80 freeway. Along with two Basque restaurants, the Buckaroo Hall of Fame, and a giant W carved into the side of a hill, Winnemucca is the test site for Project Loon, a grandiose scheme launched in 2011 to bring the internet to huge swaths of the planet where sparse population and challenging geography make the usual networks of cell towers a nonstarter.