What's your plan for dealing with the fact that Helium is a non-renewable resource that we are rapidly running out of?
Have you done experiments into hydrogen safety?
Have you done experiments into hydrogen safety?
The helium market's been pretty volatile since the U.S. government finished selling off the national helium reserve in 2019. But we think that's mostly due to short-term market dynamics because helium's a hard commodity to produce and there are only a few producers. There are lots of stories about helium running out, but we've dug in and haven't found much evidence that supply is actually drying up
We think we can build a hydrogen blimp safely. It's not on our tech roadmap currently, but in any case the best way to build a hydrogen blimp is to get lots of flight hours on a helium version first.
Interesting. Is this a case of people over-hyping the problem or just that prices are going to rise to a point that people will stop wasting it?
> the best way to build a hydrogen blimp is to get lots of flight hours on a helium version first
Can you just put hydrogen into an existing helium blimp or would you need to design a new one based on flight data?
I was under the impression they required radically different gasbag designs due to the explosion hazards (not to mention the increased lift)
The issue is more about the permeability of hydrogen gas. It can seep through all kinds of materials, including metals, and then embrittle them.
But yes hydrogen is cheap enough that refillable bottles and more leakage is cheaper than helium in terms of just the features of lifting gas. Hydrogen reactivity makes for other materials, engineering, and maintenance challenges that can be ignored with helium.
As best I can tell, this is the case. The price of helium has gone up quite a bit, but non of the commentary links that to the actual production volumes of helium or size of remaining reserves.
> Can you just put hydrogen into an existing helium blimp
We'd need to modify the envelope design, but the rest of the design wouldn't need to be modified (aerodynamics, controls, propulsion, etc.)