Airships Rise Again (2021)
smithsonianmag.com
smithsonianmag.com
You need about 1000 liters of helium or hydrogen to lift 1kg of cargo (the difference is only about 10%, despite the fact that H2 is twice as light as He they are both so much lighter than air, that you can almost think they are weightless, so all that matters is the mass of air displaced).
Let's say you want to lift 1 ton. You need a cube of balloon that's 10m x 10m x 10m. Let's put 4 of those next to each other, so you can lift 4 tons with a box-shaped balloon that's 40m x 10m x 10m. Let's make it a cylinder instead, and make the Soviet assumption that pi=3, we end up with a cylindrical balloon that's 40m long and 10m tall and can lift 3 tons. Since the ends of an actual dirigible are not quite flat, let's say you need a 50m long and 10m tall dirigible to lift about 3 tons. The ratio of lengt/height of Hindenburg was 7:1 and of Graff Zeppelin was 6:1. Current Goodyear blimps have a ratio of about 4:1.
So our intuition building block is a dirigible that's 50m long and 10m tall and can lift 3 tons.
Multiply that by 10 in all dimensions and you get a 500m long by 100m tall giant that can lift a whopping 3000 tons of cargo.
Multiply by only 5 in all dimensions and you get a 250m long by 50m tall dirigible that can lift 375 tons of cargo. That is a large dirigible, but not impossibly large. That was roughly the size of Hindenburg: 41 m tall and 245 m long.
Hindenburg was build 100 years ago. We can probably build one like that nowadays for much less. How about one that's double in size in all dimensions? I find that conceivable. And such a dirigible would have 3000 tons of lift. Can you imagine that? For comparison, the cargo capacity of the famous Liberty ships was about 4300 tons. You could get airlift capacity that's only available nowadays as sealift.
Helium is extracted from natural gas fields. It is continuously produced inside Earth by the decay of Radon; the alpha particles from the decay become helium once they acquire 2 electrons. Since helium is light, it keeps seeping upwards. Geological formations that trap natural gas will also trap helium.
Some fields have a lot of helium. There's one in the US that has 7% of it, but that's an extreme case. There are plenty in Kansas, Oklahoma and Texas with around 1-2% helium.
According to the US Geological Survey [1] the average price for private consumers for crude helium was less than $5 per cubic meter. The total reserves were a bit more than 20 billion m3, split into various levels of confidence (measured, probable, possible, speculative). You can read that to mean that essentially the reserves of helium are infinite.
Why? Oil and natural gas companies are all about reserves. Their reserves are the assets against which they raise debt, there's an entire finance area about oil and gas exploration and production. The best reserves are those that are producing right now. Below that are those other levels of reserves. The more certain a reserve is, the more money you can raise against it to finance your activities. But elevating a reserve from "speculative" to "possible" or "probable" is costly, and risky. Companies do that based on a long term plan.
But they do it. Journalists like to take the current level of reserves, divide by the current usage, and voila, the world has only x years of resource y left. Where generally x is a fairly small number, like 10. But years pass, and that x does not dwindle to zero. People think that somehow there were some new and unexpected discoveries, but otherwise, we'll still run out of the resource in a few years.
But it's not like that. The reserves get renewed as part of the normal business. Not "renewed" as in "renewable", but just as in elevating some reserves from possible to probable, some from speculative to possible, and finally expanding the speculative reserves too.
Anyway, even at the level of a few billion cubic meters of helium, we'd still have enough helium for a few thousand of these ginormous airships.
[1] https://pubs.usgs.gov/periodicals/mcs2020/mcs2020-helium.pdf
Tension members like wire scale linearly with load; a cable of 2 GPa music wire that can support 3000 tonnes would be only 140 mm in diameter. 100 meters of it would weigh 12 tonnes. This almost doesn't change if you split it into separate cables going to separate parts of the airship envelope.
It's not the Victorian age anymore, and we actually do have modern supermaterials like flash bainite, S-glass, Tyranno fiber, basalt fiber, carbon fiber, kevlar, and gelspun UHWMPE. Basalt fiber, declassified in 01995, is 2½ times as strong as music wire and one third the weight, so roughly you need 1.6 tonnes of it (1600 kg) to support 3'000'000 kg at a 100-meter span. It's not all that expensive either; it's mostly used to reinforce concrete.
Of course you need more than just a single cable, and you need a safety factor. But the available margin is much greater than you're implying. Airships don't need big trusses to carry compressive loads because the compressive load is carried by the gas, and they have to carry the load below the envelope anyway to be stable, so the load is necessarily connected to the envelope with tensile members.
I don't mean to say that it's a simple project, in particular because the failure mode is so exciting, but it definitely seems feasible.
I don't think England, Sweden, or the US is going to do it, though. They can't even fly to the moon any more, they're embroiled in partisan fighting among their ethnicities that threatens to boil over into genocide, and California's been trying to build the US's first high-speed railway for 26 years without any success. They aren't the kind of place anymore where Enrico Fermi built the humans' first nuclear reactor under the football bleachers; when Richard Handl tried to build one in Sweden in 02011 the police detained him and confiscated his supplies, due to the irrational paranoia of the public. They aren't even the kind of place my friend Aaron built RECAP anymore.
...although maybe all that tells us is that the best ones left.
I'm having a hard time thinking of what the place of these air ships will be. I realize that large cargo ships can't go everywhere, but again, we already have things like rail that far outclass what these airships are claiming.
Still, I could see parts of wind turbines moved. As they are large and unwieldly, but not that heavy.
> The new airships can carry heavier loads farther and cheaper than helicopters can, with lower emissions than fixed-wing aircraft—potentially zero emissions, if the ships are powered by hydrogen fuel cells.
> To Buerge the aerospace engineer, helicopters seem like a reasonable analogy to the new airships. “I don’t ride on a helicopter with any regularity, and you probably don’t either,” he says. But even though the civilian helicopter market isn’t near the size of the commercial aircraft industry, “I wouldn’t call helicopters an unsuccessful technology, or a technology that doesn’t exist in a serious way.”
Maybe surround the balloon with another balloon and fill the thin space between with an inert gas or helium? I guess you put some kind of gas sensor inside the baloon that would alert you to any oxygen getting in, but that would necessitate having electricity near the hydrogen, which is probably a no-no.
Every 10 years we seem to forget how little weight these things can actually carry and start dreaming again of cruise ships in the sky.
There's an old essay I can no longer find showing that airships are way too costly for their speed and payload capacities. There's a curve and they are simply way off it.
About the only use case that makes sense is picking up a moderately heavy payload in a remote location that severely lacks infrastructure, assuming you can (1) wait several days and (2) the weather is nice and predictable. Very niche.
Hot air balloons, gliders, airships seem much more casual. Not so much fighting with gravity as making a kind of gentleman's agreement with it.
I think that's why we might romanticize them. It is certainly a big reason I do.
Correct title should be "Airships Rise Again, Again".
In a sense, it is even worse. At least, fusion is a hard engineering and physics problem with many unknowns, we know we can make progress, and we do, slowly. Airships are well understood, the physics has been known since Archimedes (ok, with a little bit of fluid dynamics), and on the engineering side of things, we already know how to make every single part, we might get some improvement: lighter envelopes, more efficient engines, etc... but no amount of engineering will change the fact that we will need a huge bag of gas to lift a comparatively small payload, slowly.
I love the solar power potential! And dynamic aerodynamics. And come on, safe hydrogen harvested from the ocean, why not?
Also, I almost went on a zeppelin this year, I didn’t know it was possible to still book them in your town!
echo "Thoughts?"; read -d $'\04' -s x; echo "$x"I think just a letter or two... Anything more and I'd want to edit. Anything less and I'd worry about whether it was working. But, I will try it with my screen off
They seemed like a really nice way to travel, slow and sedate like an ocean liner, but you could take them over land.
As with LTA, he’s pushing the humanitarian applications of airships, having entered into a partnership with the World Food Program that he hopes will eventually see his invention delivering food to famine-struck regions.
I would love to see airships return, and there are many possibilities today that didn't exist in the late 19th and early 20th century. However, like supersonic flight for the masses, it doesn't seem likely to ever return to the aviation mainstream.
The world’s most profitable route should be LA to Vegas.
It’s that glass bottom ballroom, you know?
But really, flying europe would be amazing. Next time I’m at the Bodensee in Germany, i really want to fly a zeppelin!
State subsidies for the German airship industry began long before the NAZI takeover, but it's true that the NAZIS did continue them.
https://www.usatoday.com/story/travel/airline-news/2019/07/0...
If we want to scale airships (which I would be delighted to see), then I guess we have to go back to hydrogen, and then I would like to see how they would proceed to ensure safety.
More in this 9-month old comment of mine: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29611076>
And from others in a thread from just over a year ago: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28119943>
What I'm thinking instead:
Ground transportation should see a revolution in rail, particularly in flexibly coupled-and-decoupled trainsets which would eliminate marshalling issues for present freight rail systems. "High speed" transcontinental freight presently tends to take 10--30 days by rail. This could be significantly improved on. Worse, the lack of flexibility makes short haul rail freight, < 500 mi / 1,000 km, highly impractical, and prefers tucks. For all the talk of EV-based trucking, rail is still vastly more efficient in terms of mass moved distance per unit energy, it's the organisation that's utterly lacking, and there seems to be vanishingly little research into this area as I've mentioned in some previous comments.
Electrified air transport seems to me a fairly unlikely option for anything other than small-passenger count short-haul (~100 mile or so) commute hops at speeds low enough that high-speed rail is almost certainly a viable contender.
The interesting question is transoceanic transport, and here I've been thinking that submerged floating tunnels, as proposed for Norway's fjord-spanning highway projects, might be an option. Shorter links (Bearing Strait) could be achieved by conventional tunnels, and much of the Indonesian archipelago might be joined similarly or with bridges. The notion of a transatlantic link, perhaps from Newfoundland to Scotland, or from Brazil to Western Africa, would require traversing about 3,000 mi / 5,000 km of open water. The notion of a tunnel floating at 20--50m depths is provocative and not entirely implausible. I'd suspect such projects might best be piloted as automated freight conduits first, with live human passenger travel coming afterward. It's possible to link at least five or six continents within reason, and possibly even Antarctica.
Trans-Atlantic transit times might range from 15 hours at conventional speeds (240 kph / 150 mph) to as little as 2.5 hours in a hyperloop-like evacuated tube at 1,600 kph / 1,000 mph. Even at a more modest 300 kph / 186 mph an overnight journey could be made (16 hours).
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Submerged_floating_tunnel>
I've ... floated this concept a few times on HN without any nibbles so far.
<https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...>
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evergreen_Point_Floating_Bridg...
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transbay_Tube>
That cost $180 million (1970), just shy of a billion dollars in 2020, with actual structural construction (not including tracks and electrical) taking four years (1965--1969). Total length is 3.6 miles (5.8 km), so costs seem rather lower than the 520 bridge.
The immersed tube doesn't float, which introduces additional considerations, but is similar in that components are fabricated offsite then assembled and connected at the site itself, usually on or just under the seabed or lakebed.
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Immersed_tube>
That said, at $1b/3mi, a 3,000 mi link would run about a trillion dollars. It might of course be several times that.
Comparing to commercial aviation: Wikipedia gives 44 one-way million transatlantic flight seats offered in 2015, citing The Transatlantic Market <http://www.anna.aero/wp-content/uploads/2015/06/150603-conne...> At $500 per seat, that's $22 billion or so in annual passenger traffic, or a 45 year payback time based on a $1 trillion tunnel cost. Probably not a great prospect.
Self-driving cars will never do well in snow country during a blizzard.
Airships will never do well in thunderstorms or other similar severe weather.
Failing to recognize the limitations of an idea or technology is the #1 way innovators, inventors and startups fail - they lack the critical thinking rigor and fail to nip bad ideas in the bud because they are too emotionally attached (by ego or by lack of brain cells) to KILL their bad ideas. You attack your own ideas as aggressively as any competitor would to get good ideas.
I vouched for this comment based on this paragraph. I have watched this play out in press releases over and over: an innovation is presented as the next huge revolution in X, where it is actually a great improvement only in section 3.5.227 of X, and overextending it to try to revolutionize the entire field kills the innovation.
to be more specific, human visible spectrum cameras looking for white lane markers will never do well in snow country.
For certain situations, different technologies are useful.
Drivers without polarized glasses won't perform optimally in snow or rain.
You include technologies like lidar, infrared, and radar and self driving can "see" a lot more in the snow and rain at a much longer distance than 20/20 vision through a safety windshield, with wipers.
"Self driving" "cars" that aren't dependent on properly marked roads, aren't sharing with human drivers, she drive at a "safe" speed will do just fine.
Then you've just reinvented personal rapid transit, which has failed in the past because in general building totally separate rights of way only really works out cost-wise with really space-efficient modes like trains.
Failing to recognize the limitations of an idea or technology is the #1 way innovators, inventors and startups succeed, too!
Every innovator I've talked to, when I asked them, "if you knew ahead of time all the problems with your original idea, would you have gone through the trouble?", all answer pretty much the same way: The only reason they saw it through was that at any point, they thought "That's gotta be the worst part. Now how hard can the rest of it really be?"
[1] https://www.wired.com/story/asml-extreme-ultraviolet-lithogr...
[2] https://www.cnbc.com/2022/03/23/inside-asml-the-company-adva...
> Failing to recognize the limitations of an idea or technology is the #1 way innovators, inventors and startups fail - they lack the critical thinking rigor and fail to nip bad ideas
Another failing is to assume your experience is the norm and failing to identify significant market niches.
I'm not sure if you meaning to, but you comment hints that you think self driving cars won't succeed because they cannot drive well in blizzards. I will tell you now that a significant portion of the worlds population has never experienced a blizzard, let alone attempted to drive in one.
If you were just using blizzards as one example of many for the reasons automated cars will fail to catch on, my apologies. That said, I think it's a great go to market strategy to identify a smaller niche to start with, and slowly expand as your product utility increases to service broader markets.