3 Sci-Fi Projects Coming Out of Google X

Imagine trying to convince someone that Google (NASDAQ:GOOG) was a sound investment in 1985. Fifteen years before the brand became a big name, the company’s central product — its Internet search technology — would sound insane to the average person. A computer tool that lets you search for any type of information from any source, from a satellite map of Wisconsin, to all the world’s libraries, to someone’s private shrine to their cat?

It would’ve sounded like science fiction.

Today, that same search technology is the foundation of a nearly $200 billion market-cap company. Building the consumer technology of tomorrow is a risky business that’s hard to explain, which is why the process makes investors uncomfortable.

So it stands to reason that Google’s secret lab of far-out new projects profiled in a Monday report at The New York Times, called Google X, is just the kind of place that makes shareholders squirm. BGC Partners analyst Colin Gillis said of the lab’s work, “These moon-shot projects are a very Google-y thing for them to do. People don’t love it but they tolerate it because their core search business is firing away.”

Some of the hundred ideas on which Google is working sound equally as crazy today as its search technology would have 25 years ago. Look closely, though, and you see that some of Google X’s known projects are already growing business concerns. Here are three Google X projects that could bolster Google’s bottom line over the coming years:

Commercial Space Travel

One of the projects the Google X facility is working on is an elevator to space. While the language naturally conjures images of Willy Wonka’s Great Glass Elevator from Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, the practical applications of rocketless space travel are far less fanciful. As MIT professor Rodney Brooks told the Times, “Google is collecting the world’s data, so now it could be collecting the solar system’s data.”

Beyond scientific inquiry, though, Google also could revolutionize the lurching commercial space travel industry. Boeing (NYSE:BA) made headlines last year after announcing plans to offer commercial flights on its CST-100 passenger spacecrafts — a very real competitor to Virgin Group’s on-again, off-again commercial space flight program. Google might very well be the company that finally makes upper-atmosphere day-tripping a reality.