HackerTube

THE VIDEO SHELF · airborne wind energy

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

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.

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Why HN readers recommended it

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

This is a summary from the source dataset, not an endorsement by Hacker News or the video creator.

Video & recommendation details

Creator / channel
X, The Moonshot Factory
Topic
airborne wind energy
Format
documentary
Level
general
HN recommenders in dataset
6
HN mentions in dataset
10
Recommendation years in dataset
2020–2025

These counts and years describe the included Hacker News records; they are not YouTube views or the video’s publication date.

From the original HN conversations

Excerpts from the recorded comments. Follow each source for the full comment and surrounding discussion.

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

    msadowski on Hacker News · 2021-11
    In Ask HN: What are some technically inspiring movies, TV shows or documentaries?

  • 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 …

    chrisdalke on Hacker News · 2023-01
    In Caltech to Launch Space Solar Power Technology Demo into Orbit

  • 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]

    pveierland on Hacker News · 2025-01
    In How shut-down Bay Area tech companies ditch their fancy gear

Summaries, classifications and recommendation records are from the HackerTube source dataset. Read about this library and its limitations.