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Pulling Power from the Sky: The Story of Makani [Feature Film]

X, The Moonshot Factory · 1.6M views · 2020-09-10 · 1:49:56

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Overview

A feature-length film by the Makani team chronicling their thirteen-year effort to build energy kites that harvest wind power, with footage from test sites in Hawaii, California and Norway. It shows the engineering, the team and the eventual shutdown.

On Hacker News

HN recommends it as a technically rich, beautifully made documentary on ambitious hardware engineering and failure.

Recommended by 6 HN people across 5 months · HN mentions 2020–2025

Topics

Renewables, batteries & storageAviation & aerospace engineeringStartups & entrepreneurship
Search by tags
makanienergy kiteshardware engineeringx moonshotwind powerstartup failure

What people said

pveierland · 2025-01 · Strong recommendation

There's a beautiful feature film about the story of Makani. It's a great watch with plenty of technical details that follows the story from beginning to end. Available for free on YouTube: [VIDEO]

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chrisdalke · 2023-01 · Strong recommendation

Makani (Acquired by Google and shut down) built large airplane/kites which transmitted wind power to the ground via a tether. The engineering challenges were... intense. This was all documented extensively and this documentary summarizes all the footage they took: [VIDEO] One of my favorite engineering projects and documentaries, just because of the sheer ambition and scale, and the grit of the team to keep pushing through repeated failures. Sad the project was cancelled but it makes sense given the cost and complexity.

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msadowski · 2021-11 · Strong recommendation

I highly recommend Pulling Power from the Sky: The Story of Makani [Feature Film] available on YouTube: [VIDEO] .

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Sources

Video by X, The Moonshot Factory, played through YouTube.

Data and selection notes

HN summaries and labels may contain AI errors. HN dates refer to discussions, not video publication.

HN Library: HackerTube export (2026-10-31) and open-index/hacker-news. Upstream summaries and classifications may contain AI errors.

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