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Comment by drewrv | Hacker News Reader

I wonder how much the airship itself will cost at scale. Since their plan is to be autonomous, and energy costs will be low, it seems the economics of this depend on the cost of the airship and maintenance.

Put differently, if they’re cheap enough you could just buy 100 and ship 67,500 lbs a day.

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Or to be put evem more differently, 100 airships could ship less than 2 40-foot shipping containers. (At least according to https://www.technogroupusa.com/size-and-weight-limit-laws/ , though I suspect density would be the limiting factor.)

Your link says a 40' container weighs 20,000kg. The Hindenburg alone could lift 232,000kg [1].

Bouyant needs to go bigger.

[1] https://erik-engheim.medium.com/calculating-lifting-capacity...

No. It had 232 tons of bouyancy. Most of that was taken up by its own mass. The amount it could lift, its payload, was a tiny fraction of that amount. Wikipedia says it could lift aprox 10,000kg. Roughly the 5% payload ratio of a typical space launch today.

A FH can put 63,000kg to low Earth orbit. A delta 4 heavy 28,000.

Not sure where your 200,000kg “typical” comes from, even Saturn V, SLS and Starship aren’t 200t.

For those wondering:

Starship is "promissing" 100t [1] but targeting 150t reusable and 250t expendable [2], Saturn V was 140t [3], SLS 95 (block 1)/135 (block2) tons [4].

It's not clear we will ever see starship launch without an attempt to recover the booster stage, but at least in theory it's a 200t size vehicle.

[1] https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1423677217133957127

[2] https://www.spacex.com/media/starship_users_guide_v1.pdf

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saturn_V

[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Launch_System

Ratio. Payload to orbit is about 5% of launch mass.

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

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