Some scientists are serious about resurrecting zeppelins for cargo | Hacker News Reader

Some scientists are serious about resurrecting zeppelins for cargo

onezero.medium.com

154 pointssimonebrunozzi188 comments

This article doesn't seem to take into account that Helium is becoming scarce, and when used in airships, it's eventually just released and lost forever. NYT Article on the shortage: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/16/science/helium-shortage-p...

We used to have a strategic Helium reserve in the US for zepplins and so forth, then it was just kept for chemistry and other purposes. I think we started selling it down under GW. Helium seems like it's more valuable as a component in chemistry, super cooling, etc, rather than just using it for lift.

Also, we tend to think of Zepplins as rare things, like singular one-off vessels like the Hindenburg. In actuality, the Germans produced 131 of them! Most were used in World War 1 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Zeppelins

I wouldn't say that helium is becoming scarce in the sense that we can't get any more, though. I may be wrong, but my understanding is that it's just expensive to store, so nobody wants to do it if it's not worth the money. If air ships started to "take off", there would surely be more money in producing helium.

Helium is scarce in much the same way that crude oil is scarce: there are plenty of reserves still in the ground, but we are consuming them orders of magnitude faster than they were produced, and as the reserves dwindle the costs of extraction will rise.

Helium is a chemical element, and aside from nuclear reactions (which are economically infeasible for non-microscopic quantities) we can't produce more of it.

In fact our helium supply is a by-product of the petroleum industry. As we transition to renewable energy our supply of helium will diminish as well.

We can produce more of it by distilling it out of the atmosphere, it is just rather expensive.

This is exclusively how neon is produced (as far as I can find) so it is obviously economically viable at a certain price.

I did a calculation once about nuclear production of helium and found that the heat from the nuclear reactors producing enough helium to match current usage would be on the same order of magnitude as the power received from the sun across the whole planet.

Helium is light enough to escape Earth's atmosphere though. Eventually the atmosphere will run out of it.

It is also constantly being emitted by radioactive elements decaying on Earth, that's how it got in the natural gas deposits in the first place and also the atmosphere. Alpha decay makes helium, or more accurately is helium. An alpha particle is just a helium-4 nucleus.

Over what time period?

Continuous. I compared power (energy/second, watts) not energy.

Take the helium used in a year, calculate the amount of energy produced by nuclear reactions to make that helium. Compare to the solar intensity at earth's orbital distance (W/m^2) multiply by 1 year, multiply by area of circle with earth's diameter.

The result I got was within a factor of 10 between the two.

There is so little helium in the atmosphere that distillation is totally pointless. Almost all the refined helium we get is a byproduct of fossil fuel extraction.

Neon is distilled out of the atmosphere, and it is only about 3x as prevalent.

We do not produce crude oil any more because bacteries are more efficient at digesting dead trees.

So is hydrogen, and we produce that in droves.

Now granted perhaps there is no He + ? compound which we can easily split, but the fact it is an element does not imply we can't make more of it. (Pedantry aside; I of course do not mean "from something that isn't helium")

Sure, we can chemically extract hydrogen from compounds that contain it, but since helium compounds don't exist (for all practical purposes) that's not a relevant point.

Did you mean to imply we are consuming crude oil "orders of magnitude faster than [reserves are] produced"? Because that isn't true - the amount of oil "known reserves" is how much we've bothered to find and figure out to tap thus far, but whenever it seems like we might be running out we just go find and figure out how to produce more such that total known reserves are approximately stable-to-mildly-increasing.

Here's a plot of known oil reserves since 1980: https://www.indexmundi.com/energy/?product=oil&graph=reserve...

Does a similar plot exist for helium? My impression is that helium reserves are low because the world hasn't been trying very hard to increase the amount we capture as a proportion of the amount we could capture.

I consider discovering reserves to be very different from "producing" them.

With a few billions investment and very high operating costs, we may be able to create a few kilograms of helium per year.

According to [1] Helium actually escapes Earth's atmosphere at the rate of 50g/s. And most of the production of Helium is from gas reserves, and not capturing from the atmosphere.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atmospheric_escape#Earth

According to Sam Burton of The Federal Helium Program [1], we have at-least 100 years worth of Helium in Wyoming with the current supply and demand. This is before taking into account new sources.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mOy8Xjaa_o8 [1]

Should just use hydrogen. We learned how to safely fly airliners full of jet fuel, we can solve the safety problem with a bag full of H.

Is it feasible to design the aircraft so in the case of an accident it can release the hydrogen and safely glide to ground level?

Jet fuel can be contained easily. Hydrogen diffuses even through welded containers. It can also weaken them structurally: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydrogen_embrittlement

Easy to store in form of water as long as we could create it when needed, but water is heavy as fuel so it cancels the floating effect.

An airbag for airplanes that would create a floating bag of hydrogen in seconds helping to do a safe landing would be awesome on the other hand. We could use the extra oxygen for masks also.

Sorry but these “ideas” are reddit tier naive... I recommend you researching the topic of water splitting.

I'm only rambling. Sometimes is useful for finding new ways to crash things.

Okay... lets see. Water splitting recipe: 1) Put water in a recipient with a pinch of salt, 2) add electricity, 3) hydrogen will float upwards and must be recovered in a different recipient or if mixed again with the oxygen could explode. Anything else that we would need to take in mind?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gZJEDe_HUcw

> 2) add electricity,

This is the part you are underestimating. You need a lot of energy to produce the lot of electricity that is necessary to split the water into Hydrogen and Oxygen. You will need very big batteries, or some other source of energy like a big solar power plant.

Zeppelins aren't welded metal containers.

You can throw a lighted match into a can of jet fuel and it will go out - try this with hydrogen.

Despite that, jet fuel burns quite fiercely. The fires that brought down the WTC were started by jet fuel being sprayed through the buildings.

Why not use hydrogen, its cheap and zeppelins can be smaller and fly higher.

We will maybe better in avoiding accidents compared to 1937:

- have better materials

- can use it only for cargo with drones - no human should travel with them!

- should/can use routes to avoid cities, and should/could build some separate safe landing space

etc...

finally:

Hydrogen fires are less destructive to immediate surroundings than gasoline explosions because of the buoyancy of H2, which causes heat of combustion to be released upwards more than circumferentially as the leaked mass ascends in the atmosphere; hydrogen fires are more survivable than fires of gasoline or wood.[22] The hydrogen in the Hindenburg burned out within about 90 seconds

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hindenburg_disaster

I would also rather use hydrogen.

The Hindenburg disaster was spectacular, but not especially deadly! 36 fatalities, 62 survivors. Compare to modern passenger airplanes, where EVERYONE tends to die. If modern dislike for zeppelins is mostly due to Hindenburg, it's irrational.

I think there were a series of disasters - of which the Hindenburg was just the last.

All the same, I think with modern materials, Hydrogen would be pretty safe.

Indeed, Iron Maiden wrote a song about the British Airship R101, called "Empire of the clouds"

It’s at least worth considering whether modern zeppelins could be safe. All options need to be on the table for dealing with climate change.

doesn't seem that bad https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_airship_accidents

The Hindenburg accident happened while the ship was about to land; people on the ground were already holding the ropes hanging from its nose. Had the explosion happen at a higher altitude nobody wold have survived.

Using hydrogen, especially today, is a disaster waiting to happen, since any idiot with a medium quadcopter drone carrying a small explosive charge could easily outrun and shot down an airship then post the FPV video on social networks.

I think since Hindenburg fabrics has developed tremendously, and collision, perhaps even explosion safe fabrics for zeppelin hulls could be possible.

Hope they still get covered with a thick layer of thermite.

You mean "thermite, the well-known incendiary compound"? https://www.wikiwand.com/en/Thermite

There's a myth that the hindenburg was coated with different layers of metallic paint that triggered a thermite reaction when the hydrogen caught fire.

>>Using hydrogen, especially today, is a disaster waiting to happen, since any idiot with a medium quadcopter drone carrying a small explosive charge could easily outrun and shot down an airship then post the FPV video on social networks.

Literally the exact same thing could happen with a regular plane(just send a drone into a plane as it takes off), and yet somehow it doesn't happen. I guess people aren't psychotic murderers, or at least there isn't enough of them to worry about it.

I think it would be far more difficult to take down a plane than an airship given the enormous difference in velocities. Even at takeoff, a drone-sized IED would probably only be fatal to a small part of the plane's occupants, while it could probably 100% destroy a hydrogen airship in flight.

That said, I don't see any reason we'd need to put humans on these, so that probably lowers the risk massively.

> quadcopter drone ... could easily outrun

Even the old Hindenburg did 135 km/h (85 mph), which is quite a lot faster than most drones.

With predictable trajectories this does not would make a unsolvable obstacle. A drone can shoot a fireweapon so it would need just to place itself within fire range.

Airline crashes have a surprisingly high survivability rate (because the typical crash is not the craft plummeting from 30k feet, but some kind of runway incident).

To your overall point though, hydrogen isn't that much worse. In fact, many leading airship disasters involved helium.

USS Shenandoah is typical of the most common enemy of airships--strong winds. The captain warned that the updrafts and storms in the Midwest would destroy the ship but was ordered to fly over several cities anyway, just for a promotional tour.

The deadliest airship disaster in history is not the Hindenburg, but the lesser known USS Akron, a helium ship that was simply destroyed in bad weather.

> airplanes, where EVERYONE tends to die

Overall, about 95% of passengers survive airplane crashes. If you arbitrarily restrict the stats to just the most severe crashes, it's still over 50%.

This is for cargo - hydrogen is fine. They don’t even need a crew on board.

It's the second most abundant element in the universe. Maybe we'll put in a tad more effort to explore it if Helium runs out.

That doesn't really help if it isn't abundant where it's needed. There's no primordial helium on Earth, all of it is created by alpha decay of radioactive elements. As to the rest of the solar system, all that abundant helium is locked in the bottom of particularly deep gravity wells.

There's a huge amount on our only moon.

A few parts per billion, about one gram of helium-3 per 150 tons of regolith. For comparison, economical gold mining on Earth typically requires a deposit of at least 500 ppb or so. And there are no 3He "deposits" on the moon; it's all fairly uniformly distributed across the 38 million square kilometers of lunar surface!

Helium can escape Earth's atmosphere though.

Yeah, we could extract some Helium from the sun. The heat wouldn't be an issue, we'd go at night.

Helium has way more important uses in cryogenic systems, neutron detectors, etc. It's non renewable, and alot of physicists are already concerned about increasing costs. This is especially true for helium 3, the cost of which continues to skyrocket (~$2k/atmosphere*liter) . Creating massive and unnecessary demand for helium when there are renewable alternatives available is a bad idea.

I think lower-purity Helium is not as scarce, and that's what you would use for party balloons, etc. No reason why it couldn't be used for Zeppelins too.

Purifying helium is relatively trivial. All helium comes from the same oil/gas wells, and is not renewable. Many sites that could capture helium choose not to because it wouldnt make them enough money, so it floats out of the atmosphere and is lost forever. It's used for party balloons because the market is too short sighted to price it at its true value because of what naively appears to be a surplus. In 100 years people will be WTFing at our senseless waste.

Isn't 131 of something rare relative to the number of cargo airplanes, trains, ships, and trucks produced?

It seems pretty clear that those numbers side by side tell the tale.

It was mentioned in the article. The claim is that it is a general misunderstanding that we are 'running out'. Watching the embedded video apparently they have tanks where they compress the helium, removing it from the balloon, and saving it for reuse.

All air travel combined emits 2.5% of our yearly CO2 emissions.

That’s hundreds of thousands of flights a day.

We could just eliminate all coal electric plants in the world and make a real impact. Then use that cleaner energy to power our electric cars.

Eliminating the majority of generation does not enable the electric vehicle market.

Eliminating coal generation overnight would be...impractical, but if it drove up electrical costs, that would send market signals to bring more renewables, utility battery storage, and natural gas generation online.

NREL did some research about 5 years ago showing you could move ~75% of the US light vehicle fleet over to electric with no additional generation capacity, so the generation slack is there.

At peak hours? I somehow doubt that without massive and expensive amounts of new battery infrastructure we wouldn't see blackouts in major cities.

Can anyone shed light on this?

Overnight charging.

EVs are a great fit for when demand is low at night (and you’ve got to run the generator regardless), or when there’s excessive production from renewables and you don’t want to curtail and waste that power.

We should just introduce a tax for pollutioners. Big enough to make going green an economical adventage.

Problem is all of the world politicians are a corrupt scum. And this is the only reason we didnt do that already. We have means to stop polluting. We just choose not to stop.

Except we're not demi-Gods, able to decide what to do at will with the entire planet. Pursuing some serious efforts in one area can't be turned down simply because there's something else that could be done in another area.

On the contrary, the rational way of solving a complex problem that cannot be addressed entirely is to break it down into smaller ones, estimate their individual cost/impact/risk and start with the most cost-effective options.

In fact, people who actively shame others for eating meat, having vacations, and raising kids, are doing exactly that. Except, instead of optimizing the ecological impact, they optimize their own emotional return through gaining influence over others, similar to religious missionaries.

I think, for everyone who actually wants to solve the climate change problem, being honest about their goals could be a good starting point.

Exactly correct, which is why wealthy nations converting away from fossil fuel electricity production to nuclear baseload generation and renewables for peak load is critical. It’s the only thing which is feasible, has clear outcomes, and is obvious once the problem is broken down.

Unfortunately being anti-nuclear is more emotionally fulfilling for people.

It might be some sort of at-first-glance rational thing to do, certainly not very efficient.

There are a lot of people on earth, working in parallel or asynchronously should be a lot more efficient than fixing problems synchronously one-by-one and reassessing in between?

I used to think this way when I launched version 1.0 of my first software product. Just toss it out there and let people asynchronously find it, as long as it's great to use, right?

5 years and about 10 major releases later, I can confidently tell you that convincing a large group of people to do anything, even it if pays off great for them, is a long and time-consuming process, that is often more labor-intense and risky than the engineering part.

Not eating meat (or eating less meat) is VERY cost-effective and very easy to do.

it's literally nothing compared to importing less from overseas.

Only if you don't like the taste in the first place. Not being overweight and counting calories is another topic, but restraining yourself to a highly processed bean paste instead of grilling a steak in your backyard is a very questionable thing in terms of cost/impact.

Except that as a collective, we are indeed demi-gods of this planet.

You're right, air travel is just a drop on a hot plate, and is by far the cleanest way of transporting hundreds of people in (relative) comfort over vast distances. Try taking a Tesla from SF to Amsterdam.

But eliminating all coal plants in the world is not feasible in the short term. Germany tried it a while back. Turns out that some days are too dark to catch enough sunlight. Turns out that sometimes the wind doesn't blow.

Then you'd have to restart the coal plants again because they are reliable sources of energy.

Or we should consider going nuclear. Which makes perfect sense in regions like Europe where there is hardly any danger of earth quakes and tsunamis.

But Europe has bad memories of that because of outdated tech in eastern Europe going haywire.

It'll take another generation or so to get to the point where we can shut down coal plants.

> But Europe has bad memories of that because of outdated tech in eastern Europe going haywire.

Opposition to nuclear plants is much older than Chernobyl's catastrophe; it started at least in the early 70s, with the big protests in Wyhl, Germany.

And frankly, the way some western European states have been dealing with the plants we do have is not reassuring. Maybe the distribution of iodine pills in the German towns bordering Belgium was overkill, but it shows that those nuclear states aren't taking the concerns seriously enough.

Airships have a use case for bulk cargo, so it will displace some trucks.

Makes sense to use slower, low energy freight instead of deliverin cargo ASAP only for it to sit idle in warehouses afterwards. All that speed with the emission penalty is wasteful as the article describes.

Barges are cheap and slow too but going down river and letting consistent currents do the heavy lifting with a certain regimented cargo means haste becomes irrelevant. Going against the current (or wind) then generates the energy penalty, especially with returning freight.

A back-of-the-envelope calculation tells me that the efficiency of a powered airship is about the same as modern airplanes. Switching truck freight to airships would use an order of magnitude more fuel.

Higher, as long as the airship for not have to go fast and can use air currents mostly like any old balloon. It can go almost arbitrarily slow, as long as the weather is good and there is no time pressure.

The main efficiency losses in airplanes are wind resistance and takeoff/landing... An airplane cannot go arbitrarily slow or it loses lift. According to industry sources, airships are about 80% more efficient. Plus as fuel space efficiency and weight is less of a problem, they can use different fuel sources for the engines, including methane or hydrogen, and electric engines too.

Is that adjusted for the increased impact of releasing CO2 at higher altitudes?

I was looking for a curated list of the biggest co2 emitters.

The usual shows top 10 including china coal, Gazprom and india coal. But i'd like to know how things are evolving.

Emissions from air travel are set to triple by 2050.

Also that 2.5% doesn't take into account the affect of NOx on climate or contrails.

The IPCC estimate the effect of air travel is 2 to 4 times as high as that expected just from CO2 emissions.

In 30 years?

We could reduce the CO2 emissions of our electric by half within 10 years.

Begin moving to electric vehicles en masse within a decade.

Maybe a big 2025 goal should be a priority?

We should be doing more now so we need to do less later.

If we continue expanding air travel it will take our whole carbon budget within 30 years (possibly more). This means we need everything else to go to zero. It seems unlikely that we can achieve that.

I don't think we can exclude air travel just so a few people can continue jetting around the world.

stratospheric water vapor is a significant GHG in itself.

https://www.pnas.org/content/110/45/18087

https://aviation.stackexchange.com/a/53230/1174

What I don't see is a discussion of how these airships would avoid the sort of weather-related accidents that destroyed the Shenandoah, the R101, the Akron, and the Macon. The Hindenburg disaster gets all the attention, but the bigger problem with the large rigid airships was their inability to avoid or weather storms. I'd love to see it --- I really would --- but I never see this point addressed.

I know very little about any of this, but our ability to forecast weather has certainly improved in the intervening century; might that be helpful for avoiding storms?

according to the article, these newer ships could fly high enough to be above all the problematic weather. only take off and landing would be an issue. but at the speed they are flying, a few hours delay won't make much off a difference either.

I wonder if it would be easier to just lower the cargo instead of the entire airship

from their cruising altitude? more then 10000km up?

I assume you mean metres, not kilometres? There wouldn't appear to be much atmosphere to benefit a lighter than air ship at 10000 km.

uhm, yes, facepalm

Airplanes fly high and have tiny porthole windows. You can't appreciate the beauty of the earth.

Zeppelins can have huge windows and fly relatively low. The experience of flight would be amazing -- focused on the beauty of the natural world.

Zeppelins offer a low-carbon earth-conscious luxury good that the superrich should spend money on -- so that eventually it's affordable to the rest of us.

> Zeppelins can have huge windows and fly relatively low

Also they are constrained by weight, not volume, so there's plenty of legroom. The Hindenburg had private cabins, a lounge, a bar, and a dining room (and a smoking room!). More like a cruise ship than an airliner.

Here is a picture:

https://images.app.goo.gl/7Q7T2DLDjwU3xk367

Never realized there was passenger space inside the hull! That makes me slightly less stupefied about the enormous size/capacity ratio of zeppelins.

Well, if you are willing to pay 15k+ USD for a ticket, airlines like Emirates or Etihad have those things too.

I’ve done several long intercontinental trips in F on the emirates A380 and usually paid less than 4k for the tickets.

But yeah, depends on the route.

Though, in retrospect, that smoking room may not have been the best idea.

I got to ride on the Airship Ventures Zeppelin NT over the SF Peninsula and South Bay back in 2012. It was as awesome as you may guess.

There were a couple of windows we could open, and a seat in the back with a big panorama window behind it.

We were in the same cabin with the pilots, and they were happy to show us how the zeppelin worked and make little detours if there was something we wanted to see. We even got to meet the CEO of Luftschiffbau Zeppelin who was visiting that day.

Here are some photos, including Larry Ellison's house, NASA wind tunnels, and other local sights:

https://geary.smugmug.com/Flying/Airship-Ride/

Alas, Airship Ventures shut down operations at the end of 2012, but Deutsche Zeppelin Reederei still runs passenger flights out of Friedrichshafen. If you ever get to Germany, you won't regret taking a Zeppelin ride. If you're a pilot, you can even take a two-day training course and fly it yourself!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Airship_Ventures

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luftschiffbau_Zeppelin

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deutsche_Zeppelin_Reederei

https://zeppelin-nt.de/en/zeppelin-flights.html

https://zeppelin-nt.de/en/experience-the-zeppelin/pilot-for-...

> Deutsche Zeppelin Reederei still runs passenger flights out of Friedrichshafen. If you ever get to Germany, you won't regret taking a Zeppelin ride.

Looked this up just now and Jesus Christ, 450 EUR for a 60 minute tour flight??

I didn't say it was cheap, I said it was awesome. It was an experience of a lifetime.

The US flights were $500 for an hour. We got lucky and it turned out to be a 90 minute flight.

I've spent $500 on things that I got a lot less enjoyment out of than this, and I would gladly do it again.

Do you know if Solar heated balloons are good enough for small trips ?

And what's with the combination of solar heating and helium/hydrogen?

I got a dumb idea. Permanently stationed blimps around the world that never land. And cable cars for moving between them, on pulleys.

Pros: Energy efficient: no need to generate lift. No need for fans to move the cars as you are on pulleys, which are more efficient. Minimal noise! You could go as fast as you want but your efficiency will start to drop due to drag.

It can't be any worse an idea than a hyperloop can it?

Wouldn't that be like a train? Maybe cheaper. A long cable would weigh a lot?

Yes kind of like a train but without disrupting the land below so much. Maybe much faster to install too.

> Yes kind of like a train but without disrupting the land below so much.

...or the ocean below. If the blimps can be grounded to ships, the ocean floor or don't need grounding, this could be a realistic way of building bridges across the oceans.

A movable bridge which hangs in the air :-)

Sounds like they would need to keep the same position.

Would that be practical for such a large, light ship that can not avoid the weather?

Yes... They may have to be grounded occasionally during extreme weather.

But they can be tethered to the ground and use the tether for power for maneuvering with electric props.

There is not much weather high enough. drag on the cables due to wind would be the primary concern.

Hyperloop tubes held aloft by blimps!

Awesome idea!!!

Let's just make orbital lifts while we're at it.

If you're going to do that, you could probably use towers instead of blimps.

Floating bridges sound a lot easier and less dangerous.

If they used H2 (vs He) for buoyancy they could make (liquefied) H2 fuel very cost efficient: When you want to come down you are high up and it is cold! Perfect time to liquefy!

Making H2 gas is also subsidized on the production end, as Airship travel is cheaper than any other method, so making H2 has that cost advantage.

Safety is not an issue for transport. Human travel has that tradeoff though over He.

> Safety is not an issue for transport.

It's less of an issue. You still don't want a burning hydrogen zeppelin crashing down on a populated area, and unless you've fully automated it you'll still have human crew aboard (though they'll be better trained and equipped to deal with problems).

If it's filled with Hydrogen, it doesn't burn for very long - it would be an explosive burn. The cargo is still aloft in the air though, but that's also a theoretical problem with planes.

Why wouldn’t people think this is a serious idea?? We can make far safer zeppelins with current technology even if we use H2 gas. And when you’re using it for something mundane like cargo instead of human recreational activity it’s a no brainer.

It would seem like it has the same issue as nuclear power, where the problem really is public perception not the science underlying it

Wind shear.

Pirates.

I'd pay good money for an airship cruise, as a premium product - like a direct competitor to a cruise ship on the sea.

German company Cargolifter tried, about 20 years ago.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CargoLifter

My father worked at the company back then, designing the rudders. After that, he worked at Airbus until retirement. He always said that his coworkers at Cargolifter where really good engineers and much brighter on average than at Airbus, I always wonder where they might be if they didn't run out of funding / if they would have started the company today, where people are much more willing to invest into risky firms like these.

The article's headline seems misleading: the article is actually about cargo, not traditional travel -- since airships are so slow.

But I don't see what needs this would meet -- either you need something to be shipped between continents quick (~overnight) so you use a plane, or you don't so you use a container ship.

This seems like it has neither the speed advantage of a plane, nor anything close to the size and scale advantage of a container ship.

So aside from the niche use of large deliveries to remote areas inaccessible by ship or rail... I'm not getting it.

How do you drive a container ship over land?

I Think the point is that you could use this across the USA or other large geographic bodies for similar efficiency that you see with a container ship on water.

I'm not sure, but I think some standard shipping containers fit on semi truck beds and on special train cars.

a freight train

Wonderful thing called a railroad network.

Rail can only carry objects that can fit inside the cross-section and streets aren't much better.

The defunct Cargolifter protect was quite open about not attempting to be competitive for loads that easily fit conventional transport. They saw their market exclusively in loads that are too bulky for ground transport and I don't think that anything has changed.

Other than that this hypothetical market could be really huge now that wind turbines have grown into the "untransportable" realm for offshore use where no practical transport restrictions exist. (At least in countries that haven't universally given in to NIMBY and are still expand their land-based wind capacity)

> Rail can only carry objects that can fit inside the cross-section and streets aren't much better.

Trains typically carry the same intermodal containers that cargo ships do.

That answers GP's "how do you drive a container ship over land" but we seem agree that container transport is a solved problem that airships can't meaningfully contribute to.

But there are objects that don't fit the rail profile that still need transportation.

And a lot more objects that don't fit that profile, or the more generous limitations of an oversize road load, that could exists if matching overland transportation existed. A lot of technology is severely size-constrained only because roads between factory and deployment site are size constrained. A cargo airship that can take those loads could completely change whole industries.

Yes just trying point out the comment was a little short sighted

Title updated to say cargo. Thanks!

For remote are delivery, there is the often ignored issues of replacement mass.

Basically, if you deliver 100 tons to some remote location, the airship is now 100 tons lighter once you ofload it. Unless you want it to immediatelly shoot up to the stratosphere, you need to rebalance it.

You either have tobrelease some of the gas to reduce the lifting force (pretty expensive if you use helium) or load 100 tons of some replacement mass (even if you load 100 tons of local dirt, it can still not be an easy task on a remote location).

A former neighbor of mine now works at http://flying-whales.com/en . Spot on the topic. They plan to specialise on special fret counting in dozens of tons, plus clever engineering to quickly transition between cargo on-the-ground to cargo airborne, and on arrival, airborne to on-the-ground.

Off topic but I couldn't help but find it funny that a French airship company is called Flying Whales given that one of the best known songs by French metal band Gojira is called Flying Whales.

When I see old pictures with zeppelins in the sky, I am jealous and think they're more futuristic than we are.

Airships don’t make sense for commercial travel. But they make a lot of sense for transporting cargo, specifically to regions that are difficult to serve by road or rail. LM has had a scalable, deployable system for years but no one has pulled the trigger on actually buying it yet.

An ordinary suburban location is difficult to serve by road if you'd like to ship a large house.

I hadn't even considered that. You could blimp all sorts of things that won't fit on the road. Houses, windmill blades, HVAC units, pods for modular buildings, extremely large pianos, ...

Narrow gauge is a good solution for mountainous or rural areas, but infrastructure intensive solutions require government investments.

There is huge potential for solar energy production on zeppelins. Back of the napkin:

The Graf Zeppelin had a surface area of 27,299 square meters. If the top ⅓ was covered in solar, it could produce 10,800 kWh per day, assuming 1.2 kWh per day per square meter.

Also, they could harvest sea water or condensation to generate hydrogen.

To produce one kilogram of hydrogen, 12 cubic meters, it takes 9 kg of water and 50 kWh of electricity. The solar Zeppelin described above could generate 2,589 cubic meters of hydrogen a day. At this rate, it would take 77 days to fill the Graf Zeppelin's 200,000 cubic meter capacity

So, perhaps we could float giant plastic solar balloons in a lake -- and semi-organically "grow" enormous hydrogen cells for aerostatic lift.

This article reads like Popular Science or Popular Mechanics.

From the late 80's.

I don't mean to be pessimistic, but this ship has already sailed. Pun intended.

Incidental article about Macys Thanksgiving parade baloons are filled with Helium https://www.northjersey.com/story/news/2019/11/27/macys-than...

At the end the gas is released, not recycled.

I think recreational use of helium ought to be banned. It’s a rare gas that once gone is gone from the atmosphere. It’s likely that our great great grandchildren won’t have it left for other uses.

Well it’s also likely that they really won’t have a habitable planet too.

But we gotta start somewhere right ?

Like the render on the Lockheed Martin site the first thing that came to my mind was Africa. This could be a solution for heavy-load cheap transport across huge swaths of land where road or rail infrastructure would be inefficient or too expensive to develop. It could help extend commerce beyond coastal regions both on the continent and worldwide.

Reminds me of https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/CargoLifter

"... using almost no energy at all if we used airships to harness the free winds of the jet stream, the narrow band of fast-moving air above the troposphere, where planes fly." But what if the jetstreams are already transporting something useful in nature? Sucking off energy from there will mean messing up with those natural systems that rely on the jetstreams. Oh Consequences!

Here is a short slide presentation with great pictures of future zeppelins and an exploration of possible applications:

https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1r6CPFJ1AX1ZULacguTf6...

A different way to reduce the fuel bill and contamination without being constricted by scarce non scalable resources could be to design a new generation of (small?) cargo airplanes flying in a zig zag pattern of spending fuel to gain elevation and then gliding with some extra big pliable wings, extensible membranes or something like that...

Great now if we can just stop Bedford council building houses all over Cardington we can get the Sheds back in use.

And where will they source the helium? Gas wells?

We already waste the stuff and it's an incredibly useful substance.

Better idea ultra high speed megascale nuclear powered cruise ships that never dock. They pull in 1 km from port and use deckside drones to transport tens of thousands of passengers safely on shore in different places all at once or as needed. Speed should reach at least 150mph. And with nuclear power become the domina t coastal form of circuit/belt transport. Not just people but cargo. Nuclear powered merchant marine should have happened. One day it will.

Problem with zepllins is the skin will never be robust...because the bigger and faster the zepplins go the thicker the skin must be and the more difficult self healin smart skin systems will be to invent iterate and operate.

Forget c02 and global warming. Think about simple economics. Next generation systems must be an order of magnitude more efficient in delivering a passenger to his ultimate goal or to any goal. That doesnt always mean only energy efficiency and operation and fuel price per passenger mile but these are strong factors in the equation.

It's effectively impossible to run a large surface ship at much over 40kts no matter how much power you have. The drag on a displacement hull is too high, and planing hulls and hydrofoils don't really work for anything large.

There was a company working on hydrofoils for cargo ships in one of the recent YC batches. No idea how it’s going, but they at least seem to think it’s possible to put foils on something large.

What about cargo torpedoes? I imagine you could fit an airplane load into a very large submarine/torpedo and send it at 200 km/h with a nuclear powered propulsion.

No idea if this idea is any good or not, but I wouldn’t recommend marketing this solution using the words “nuclear” and “torpedo”.

The fastest submarine of all time only went 75 km/h...

So? The idea is batshit insane, but I'm not sure it's against physics. Imagine a supercavity nuclear powered submarine cargo ship. I can't run the calculations for that. It would probably kill/scare all whales left in the ocean, but it might "work".

Boundary Layer Technologies is developing small cargo hydrofoils to compete with air freight. This may be a viable niche market. But their design looks like it has only about 1% of the capacity of the largest displacement hull container ships. Hydrofoil technology doesn't scale. And the cruising speed won't be much over 50kts.

Agreed! A possible solution in this style are Wing-In-Ground effect aircraft (WIGs) such as the Pelican.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boeing_Pelican

Having said that, hydrogen airships are probably the way to go due to abundant gas, high lift, ability to compress as per airlander.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hybrid_Air_Vehicles_HAV_304/...

Ah didn’t realize it was just for very small cargo ships, thanks for the analysis.

Jeremy from BLT. I just saw this post, cool!

You are right on that we're developing small cargo ships at about 1% of the largest containers ships. However, a comparison to the largest container vessel is not fair. Our concept has 160 twenty-foot containers (TEU), which is the same as fourteen 747 cargo airplanes and can complete on freight duration with airfreight. Most air freight takes 3-7 days despite a 12 hours in-air transit time, and the remaining time is sitting around airports. We can deliver in 6 days across the pacific ocean, and port wait times are minimal because of our small vessel. Though, if you pay 10x the premium, you can get FedEx or DHL to deliver up to a 1 ton anywhere overnight. Airfreight moves 35% of the world's cargo value and is a $100b market, and a single airplane is only 0.06% capacity of the largest container ship. Hardly niche.

If the hydrofoils ships are too large, they will spend too much time filling the vessel rather than delivering point-to-point cargo, improving the service. Most ocean lines make 4-6 stops at ports, while a small foil ship can load quickly and make no stops, thus significantly reducing the door to door duration.

Correctly pointed out, hydrofoils do not follow the same scale laws as standard buoyancy vessel. The amount of cargo that can be delivered increases with the cube of the length assuming all else scales, meaning the fuel and crew cost per container decreases drastically with larger ships. That's why we see mega-20,000 TEU-container-ships. Hydrofoil ship lift capability scales linearly with plan area of the foil, so we don't gain much making them mega-ships.

Airships are cool. I'd like to see one built.

For the mega nuclear powered cruise ship, you can have a sliding deck that everyone pre-loads onto for fast boarding and exit. Imagine if an entire floor could slide out onto the dock, and the floor above could slide into the ship at the same time. Both floors hold all people exiting and entering the ship.

I'd hate to think what the propellor noise would do to whales and other sea life.

If we're already fantasizing about going nuclear, why not also use classified military submarine propulsion systems? That ought to keep the noise down.

Use air propellors, like a hovercraft, and annoy the birds instead.

If they were serious they would have calculated the max theoretical energetic efficiency of Zeppelin cargo hauling and realized they should stop

Can you expand, or give some numbers?

https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/guest-blog/helium-hokum...

One problem with airships is the shear size and hence the handling, particularly during the time the airship is in dock.

I suppose it could be possible to leave the airship in the air almost indefinitely, with smaller craft doing the loading/unloading at each end.

Resurrecting dirigibles comes up every 5 years or so. This attempt looks no more serious than the others.

Why not sailing ships while we are at it?

The article addresses this. Ships are restricted to docking where there are ports, which are expensive and potentially fragile infrastructure (e.g. after a big storm), and can only be situated at the water's edge; while airships can pick up put down essentially anywhere.

Anyone have a non-paywalled version? Frustrating to only be able to read the first paragraph.

Seven days from Dallas to China? How is this considered a serious alternative to current planes?

Maybe an alternative to cruise ships is a better option.

Cargo.

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