When Kohli joined the nascent effort that was Project Loon in 2012, his job was to run around the world finding and collecting downed balloons from the Mojave Desert, rural Brazil, the coast of New Zealand. Loon was part of Google X, the arm of the search company that fostered audacious projects applying emerging technologies to stubborn problems in novel ways. One such project was self-driving cars. (In 2015, when Google restructured, creating its parent company Alphabet, Google X was renamed X.)

Kohli—not your usual Googler—is oddly qualified to survive the apocalypse. He didn’t get the grades for med school, so he trained as an emergency room technician—a background which, combined with his pilot’s license and eight years of search-and-rescue operations in the Sierra Nevada, made him just what Loon was looking for. This practical skill set and eye for operations makes him one of the many new kinds of people X needs to fulfill its mission: expanding Alphabet’s reach beyond the computer in your lap and the phone in your pocket.

With Alphabet’s help and resources, Kohli (who now runs flight operations) has seen Loon evolve past watching balloons fly hundreds of miles off course, to the point where a launch like today’s is nothing special. It’s just another step toward delivering the complex system Loon envisions in the future.

Today, X is marking a major step forward in that mission by announcing that Loon is “graduating”—becoming a stand-alone company under the Alphabet umbrella. Along with Wing, another X effort that delivers goods with autonomous drones, Loon will start building out staff and putting together its own HR and public relations teams. Its leaders will get CEO titles, and its employees will get an unspecified stake in their company’s success. Generating revenue and profit will matter just as much as changing the world. (On July 19, Loon announced its first commercial agreement, working with Telkom Kenya to provide internet coverage to central parts of the African country in 2019.2)

Loon and Wing are not the first projects to get their diplomas from X (and, yes, employees get actual diplomas). Verily, a life sciences outfit with plans to monitor glucose levels with contact lenses, made the leap in 2015. And lo, the self-driving effort made the leap in December 2016, taking on the name Waymo. Cybersecurity project Chronicle ascended to autonomy in January.

The dual graduation of Loon and Wing—both big, ambitious, projects—marks a watershed for X and perhaps the moment when the secretive research and design division starts to make good on its mission. For the technological giant that has made its billions in advertising, X isn’t a junk drawer for unusual projects that don’t fit elsewhere in the corporate structure. It’s a focused attempt to find a formula for turning out revolutionary products that don’t just sit on a screen but interact with the physical world. By launching Loon and Wing into the world, X will soon discover whether it can effectively hatch new Googles—and put Alphabet at the head of industries that don’t yet exist.

But Alphabet’s attempt to birth the next generation of moonshot companies raises two questions. Can this behemoth grow exponentially? And do we want it to?

The Loon lab in X’s Mountain View headquarters is piled with the results of generations of falls and spills. Loon is based on a simple idea—replace ground-based cell towers with high-flying balloons—which concealed a beguiling series of technical problems. In 2013, after a year of work, the balloons still had a nasty habit of popping or falling to earth after a few days. (They carried parachutes to soften the blow to their electronics payloads, and the team would warn air traffic control of their descent). Before setups like the one dubbed Big Bird, when the launch process resembled a gang of kids trying to will a kite to take off, a puff of wind could derail the whole thing.