Googletown, USA

Sean Hollister investigates the company’s takeover of Mountain View, California and surrounding areas:

Google’s lease of the 1,000-acre Moffett Federal Airfield is mystifying at first. According to Deborah Feng, associate director of NASA’s Ames Research Center, Google can’t do whatever it wants with the land. The company will not only need to renovate the historic hangars but also run the actual airport whenever the California Air National Guard or other government entities need to use it. “What they do in the hangars is their own business as long as it’s not illegal,” says Feng, adding that Google can use Moffett’s sizable airspace too. However, an FAA representative tells us that the company still won’t be able to do anything special with that airspace — like testing drones — without explicit approval. Feng says that to her knowledge Google will use the hangars as R&D facilities of some sort, but that the company is limited to a relatively small 90,000 square feet of developable space outside the hangar walls.

Moffett Field begins to make more sense, though, when you consider that it could be part of Google’s master plan.

In 2008 Google leased 42 acres from NASA at the northwestern corner of Moffett Field as well as nine acres at the east end of Charleston Road, and it soon proposed building futuristic new campuses to rival the Googleplex at both locations. Then it proposed a bridge over the creek separating its huge North Bayshore holdings from the Moffett Field area. If you add the Palo Alto tract that Google bought this year and another proposed bridge between that Palo Alto property and Mountain View, Google could soon have a practically unbroken line of property bridging Palo Alto, Mountain View, and Sunnyvale. With a clear corridor connecting those three areas like one that Google has proposed, the company could reduce its dependence on Highway 101. And if it could house employees on federal property, those people could work, eat at Google cafes, and go home again without ever leaving Google’s island.

(Aerial view of Google’s headquarters, Moffett Field, and other parts of Mountain View courtesy of, well, Google Maps)