LTA Research’s Pathfinder 1
spectrum.ieee.org
spectrum.ieee.org
Helium is expensive, limited, and not easily produced, whereas hydrogen is readily available almost anywhere, has no quantitative limits, and provides far superior lift than helium. Of course, hydrogen is extremely flammable and explosive. If there was a way to minimize or completely mitigate this problem then airships would certainly become more viable than they currently are. The article mentions the use of fire-retardant materials as part of its covering. Perhaps this in combination with tens of thousands of isolated gas "sacs" and an outer helium buffer (To isolate the hydrogen from external heat sources, laser-based weapons, static electricity, etc.) could make hydrogen a viable choice?
Another less-discussed option is hot air/helium combos, which at large sizes have some distinct advantages.
Many of the ideas we all come up with for airships technically will work and the fact that we keep thinking of these things over and over again through the years speaks to how fascinating the concept of an airship is; however, we've never had a problem making an airship that works. That's the easy part. Making one that anyone would want to use for everyday transport is the hard problem.
North to South because the air would go from colder to warmer rather than from warm air to colder air if done in the opposite direction and the reasons for a diagonal course is because it would cover a lot more 'interesting sights to see from the air' for a multi-day 'air cruise' type cruise (best way to explain that is a literal air-cruise as in a sea-cruise).
For a passenger trip it would have to be an extremely HNV costing (passenger cost/ticket price paid * weight able to be carried) but do-able for say 4 - 7 passengers but Cargo would be the way to go for the bread-and-butter stuff because A) The weights and destinations are pre-known and optimised and B) Going on a diagonal route would beat road and rail delivery speeds and provide some financing to the back-haul of getting the (now empty) air-ships back to the departure point.
[Edit To Update]: Ughh! you can tell I'm not a pilot because cold air is better than hot air in terms of aircraft lifting capacities so South to North would be better and maybe a change of route from Miami to Seattle would also work out ok in terms of shipping ports that intersect with cruise ship ports.
[Double Edit, Sorry]: On second thoughts, North to South for passengers and South To North for cargo is better because cargo is low margin so would need the greater lifting capacity. Or not.... Like I said, pure spit-balling!
I have no idea how many problems there are with that, or how diffuse helium is/how hard it would be to harvest from space, but floating airship stations like Bespin would be awesome.
Most of the second approximation is hydrogen not helium.
Yes proportionally, there’s a fair bit of helium but most of what’s there is nothing.
And if it doesn’t clump there, does it clump anywhere, or is there some reason it’s naturally diffuse?
You can let it leak out, but then you need to carry extra compressed gas above what is already needed for the same issue with helium.
You can build a tighter, multi-layered envelope, but then you're adding weight and quickly negate the extra lift. This is the category your tens of thousands of sacs idea falls in. The problem there is that you are massively increasing the surface area through which the hydrogen can slip out. You have to keep in mind, to a single hydrogen atom, everything we consider "solid" looks more like a fishing net for catching a whale. Our best designs so far usually involve layering and offsetting those nets so as to at least slow the atoms down as they path through the mesh.
Assuming that the airship can sustain a 10K C hydrogen plasma, of course.
Maybe just at the boundary.
Most likely you either have to pump a lot of power through the mesh to get field coverage enough to reliably bounce atoms away from the skin or you have to make the wire mesh so dense that you've basically got a layer of copper as your envelope and are therefore far too heavy to lift off.
It seems like too obvious an option to have simply been missed over the decades.
Still, I have to wonder if someone will invent a way to coat a string of fabric in like 1nm thick copper film. Or maybe graphene will save this idea too.
If one of these cargo airships puts down its heavy cargo in a remote location the airships whole mass balance changes – the airship is suddenly far lighter because it doesn’t contain the mass of the cargo anymore. To keep the airship from rising into orbit of the mass of the cargo must be replaced (or the expensive helium let go). The german Cargolifter startup back in the late 90s intended to do this with pumped water and I remember a prototype demonstrating that successfully by lifting and lowering a tank.
But: To transport your cargo to that remote, inaccessible location you’ll need to transport the airship ground support to that remote, inaccessible location: infrastructure for anchoring, a pump, a generator for that pump, fuel, and possible the same mass of water as the cargo. And if you can transport all that mass by conventional means to that remote, inaccessible location, chances are high that you can already transport the cargo to that location.
Another way would be to ditch gases altogether and go for containers able to hold a vacuum against air pressure. Something along the lines of an aerogel with an airtight membrane around it.
"""
Compressing Helium requires special purpose-built compressors.
Helium gas has a density that is 86% less than air. This means that the compressor has to be built to extremely tight tolerances to effectively compress helium gas without excessive blow-by. Furthermore, helium releases large amounts of heat when compressed, which the compressor must be able to absorb and shed. Therefore, for larger helium compressors, BAUER uses water cooling for the compressor for increased cooling efficiency.
Typical helium applications include recovery and compression systems for liquid cooling used in research institutions, particle accelerators, nuclear medicine, aerospace, and military missile applications. Helium recovery and compression is also used in general industrial applications, commercial merchant gas filling plants, heliostat applications, and helium mining. """
Barring really bad weather, airships can anchor to a metal structure comparable to a radio tower. So, any place that is capable of having FM/AM radio stations or cell phones.
Pump and fuel for it, and a water source also isn't all that rare. Any place that has a well with a non-manual pump, or anywhere you can drive a vehicle to, qualify. Driving one vehicle with pump+fuel on it locally to be able to receive lots of cargo from much farther away can still be a good trade-off.
The airship can also trade cargo capacity for location independence by putting the pump and its fuel in the cargo bay.
I seriously doubt these are the biggest obstacles for their ideas.
Fly by wire airships are not new. DARPA had the Lockheed Skunk Works develop one. That was nicely maneuverable; it could taxi out of a hangar and take off, fly around, then land and taxi back home. Fans on multi-axis gimbals for control.[1] Worked fine, nobody could find a use for it.
The Zeppelin NT airships (remember Airship Ventures flying over Silicon Valley) worked quite well. Not quite as maneuverable as the Skunk Works craft, but far easier to dock than traditional airships. The guy behind that used to speak at steampunk conventions. When the price of helium doubled and the tourist business collapsed in 2008, they had to shut down.
The big cost item with these things is replenishing helium leakage.
There may be a market for flying yachts.
(May 2022) "Helium shortage 4.0"
https://qz.com/2171115/the-world-is-facing-helium-shortage-4...
The major uses include for cooling magnetic resonance imaging equipment at hospitals, and for weather balloons (critical data for short-term weather forecasts). However, small drones may take over from weather balloons for data collection soon. Lab research and manufacturing processes seem to be in third place.
I suppose if airships can hang onto their helium long-term, it'd be less of an expense. Interestingly hydrogen though flammable provides more lifting power... maybe hydrogen-filled drone airships would be an option for delivering goods, if not people.
Why not use hydrogen for weather balloons?
Since lifting empty space is “free” you can have absolutely huge rooms in a cruise ship of the skies.
On top of that, any time you're moving through a fluid your speed is determined by your thrust/drag ratio. When adding more space internally you have parasitic drag and induced drag working against you. Parasitic drag increases as you add surface area and when you grow your forward facing profile. Induced drag increases with the amount of lift you need to fly, more sq.ft, more material weight, more lift needed, more induced drag. Airships mostly fly with lifting gas but still generate a lot of body lift once they start moving.
So if you'd like to go anywhere once you get off the ground, you're going to need to balance cabin size against the size of the engines needed to produce enough thrust to travel at a reasonable speed along with the fuel weight required to travel any distance.
The cruise industry is constantly retooling for economy of scale.
This is the big problem with airships. Over land, they are competing with large trucks which can carry 25 tons of cargo at similar speeds. Over water, they are competing with cargo ships that can carry 1000’s of times that amount of cargo, again with roughly similar speeds.
But maybe Russia will want to massively increase their southeastern trade?
Cargo ships also run at a third of the speed, their advantage is fuel efficiency by weight and number of human crew by weight.
If you could get capacity to something like 10 or 25 ton, it could directly compete with cargo by being slightly faster and more fuel/manpower efficient
https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/guest-blog/helium-hokum...
Airships occupy an unfortunate gap in the cross-section of mass moved over distance per time and energy space. Unless they build one that goes faster than a plane for the same fuel or consumes less fuel to get the same amount of cargo across the same distance, it will always be better time/money spent to clear a dirt runway or build a road.
New materials don't get us there. At best, the new envelope saves on how much helium needs to be bought in addition to fuel...but that's competing against other tech that doesn't need to buy helium at all.
And going all electric doesn't do it either. That only forces the trade off between cargo capacity and energy generation/storage. We already know batteries are not more energy dense than jet fuel so that will continue to be a losing trade until batteries equal chemical fuels. This is made even worse by the fact that fuel burns off in flight, making fueled engines more efficient during the flight while batteries are just as heavy empty as they are full.
The unknown is the lifting gas helium is expensive and hydrogen can leak and go boom. But the speed does not necessarily matter if the cost is much lower and sustainable
Technically you could build an airship that only uses power to get into a jet stream then floats across the Atlantic on the wind saving tons of fuel, but then you've reinvented a sailboat in the sky and the buoyant force of water always beats that of air. So you might as well put your cargo in an actual sailboat and get there faster (see ocean currents v wind above them) without needing to "fuel" the thing with hydrogen or helium.
This is just one example of the cross-section we can't escape. It is as tyrannical as the rocket equation is to space travel. For anything to be a viable transport, it needs to go faster, use less fuel, or carry more cargo than other modes of transport.
Or the 747-8f if you are in a hurry.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boeing_747-8#747-8_Freighter
It wasn’t surprising that the first picture was at Moffit Field. There’s an airship hanger there you can see from the freeway.
But what fired my neurons is the mention of Akron, because there is an airship hanger there because that’s where Goodyear was/is headquartered. [1]
These are specialized buildings with non-trivial structural requirements…when buildings get that big holding them down is at least as hard as holding them up.
Not technically, all it takes is concrete. [2] Physically it takes a lot of concrete and the more efficient the superstructure the more concrete it takes. Cover a skeleton with fabric and you have a very very large sail.
This makes staging for humanitarian missions more difficult than ordinary alternatives like a C130. A minimum viable airstrip can be constructed in days (i.e. weeks), an airship hanger will take months (i.e. years).
That’s not to say there’s no possible niche in humanitarian missions. Just that it is no more obvious to me than to the article’s author (and presumably it was not clearly delineated by the company to the author).
But I am being presumptive and recognize I may well have missed something.
[1]: Too lazy to research tire industry consolidation.
[2]: and steel to transfer all the uplift and sheer forces to that concrete and more steel to distribute those forces —- and no, Roman concrete doesn’t avoid this…and besides the Tufa makes it less dense and therefore would require more volume even if unreinforced concrete is brittle and therefore terrible in tension and fails catastrophically. But I digress.
Doesn’t sound like a big market, and it has to compete with cargo planes (faster, more capacity than this Pathfinder 1 with only 4 tons) and helicopters (more nimble).
Some companies manage to be successful by tapping a market whose demand comes up rarely but is highly inelastic. We're talking about stuff like sea lifters that can handle ocean liners, or even mobile power stations.
I'm sure that some deep-pocketed organizations whose know-how focuses on subcontracting and commissioning work, like the UN, would willingly pay a premium to be able to transport large volumes of cargo throughout regions with little to no transportation infrastructure and where roadway traffic is a major volnerability. Being able to secure logistics without having to control routes or have to police anyone would be worth a small fortune.
It's an evergreen magazine topic, like six-pack abs on the covers of men's fitness magazines.
Which is entirely different from fusion. On other hand flying cars are combination of both, they don't make sense and technology isn't ready.
We still do not need to believe it, but obstacles do get overcome with time, and if at some point someone can make a business out of it, we will wonder why it took so long since it was so easy.
A thermonuclear bomb set off in a giant underground tank of water would make a lot of power and we would have no trouble controlling and harnessing that. We just don't want to do it that way. We already have tons of trouble getting people to approve building a controlled nuclear melting pot anywhere near them, no one would ever agree to let you detonate bombs under their feet. That doesn't mean the tech doesn't work. It means we don't want to use it.
And flying cars have existed since the term was invented. They're called airplanes. You can get a four seat one to fly yourself for about 40k. They are a bit harder to "drive" than regular cars and we don't make as many places to park them so most people don't want one. Plus gas prices already limit how much people drive, try burning 10 gallons/hr.
Airships work too, they just occupy a niche that we do not have a need for other than entertainment value. Cargo ships get lots of stuff across water cheaper, trucks get stuff across land cheaper, and cargo planes get more stuff through the air faster.
I assume it happens each time a company has got some funding together to start some early prototyping.