Sergey Brin's airship gets FAA clearance
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I expect that they are really designing for hydrogen lift, the economics become a lot better and pretty much everyone understands what killed the Hindenberg wasn't the hydrogen rather it was the outer skin catching fire. "Teldar"[1] (I think that is a wonderfully stupid name) is much less flammable. If you ask "Why hydrogen?" The reasoning goes like this; The value of an airship is determined by its range and its cargo capacity raising either increases the airships suitability for various tasks. Hydrogen provides 8% greater lift per cubic liter over helium and costs 1/10th what helium does to source and supply. So economically it just makes more sense but we haven't had hydrogen airships because of the public perception of their danger (and thus the lack of investment). Anyway, there are some great applications for dirigibles and "disaster relief" and "heavy lift" are but two. Something about being able to just sit there for hours over a point that is unreachable by land is pretty appealing.
[1] https://www.dupont.com/content/dam/dupont/amer/us/en/tedlar-...
A competitor to the Mississippi River system!
This claim is always trotted out, but is false. The kerosene fuel produced the visible flames, while the hydrogen burned mostly invisibly. The skin mostly survived. Another common and false claim was that a bomb started it. No, it was the leaking hydrogen that ignited.
This doesn't mean a modern, unmanned airship shouldn't use hydrogen for lift. Adequate ventilation prevents ignition of leaks, and modern sensors can detect leaks. Harvesting humidity to replenish losses, using solar panels all over the top of it, is a reasonable design choice.
> This claim is always trotted out, but is false. [...] The skin mostly survived.
Really? You can see the skin burning away in the photos and film: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hindenburg_disaster
I can't imagine what this this would do to helium prices if we had widespread helium airships. I've got a full set of doubles with 18/45 (45% helium in them) out in my garage right now that could become my retirement savings.
I'm not sure it would meaningfully impact hydrogen prices if we had widespread hydrogen ships.
For example, you can generate fairly pure hydrogen on-demand by passing electricity through water. Hydrogen is abundant and can be generated on-demand with low-tech tools from any water source.
As a fellow diver, open circuit helium mix diving is probably not going to be sustainable. We'll probably all have to switch to rebreathers soon.
https://old.reddit.com/r/AskEngineers/comments/3eqnqo/will_h...
https://www.johnchatterton.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/03/cr...
> "Why hydrogen?" The reasoning goes like this; The value of an airship is determined by its range and its cargo capacity raising either increases the airships suitability for various tasks. Hydrogen provides 8% greater lift per cubic liter over helium and costs 1/10th what helium does
You are making an error
Applying purely rational considerations to what will be an emotional decision
Weep...
I can’t wait for the jet packing up and down for parties and whatnot.
This seems like it’s out of Altered Carbon.
Luxury in an airship is quite relative: weight gets you, and something as simple as water or people to handle service, for instance, is heavy. Not a billionaire's dream — not when Page already has a shower in his 747.
Source: my brother started a business for airships and asked me to add numbers to different options. Accidentally, I was also working for Paradox when City Skylines came out, and I suggested adding airships to the game when they asked for new transport methods. No idea if that’s how they ended up there, but happy they are.
It seems like a boat would be better to bring cargo to offshore applications. Especially factoring in weather.
The problem is getting the blades to the boats. Offshore wind turbine blades can be as long as 100m [1] and they're only getting longer and longer as that's the best way to maximize energy output.
However, many roads have not been designed for such lengths, so the heavy transports needed for this need special clearance and are limited to a very limited subsection of roadways that are also used for other heavy transports which also means that there's a ton of bureaucracy involved, to the tune that the central authority for German highways is now a critical bottleneck as it's swamped in that bureaucracy [1], not to mention that the place for parking these transports during the day is also highly limited.
An airship would need to load the blade up once and could then travel unimpeded to the manufacturing site where all that's needed to unload it is a mobile grounding anchor rig.
[1] https://www.enercity.de/magazin/unsere-welt/so-funktioniert-...
[2] https://www.mdr.de/nachrichten/deutschland/wirtschaft/fakten...
Loading them on boats is expensive because they are non-standard size, and large and flexible enough cranes aren’t available everywhere.
Finally, there aren’t boats of the right size, and those that are increasingly expensive. Airships are also faster (not by much, admittedly) and less sensitive to bad weather (not by much either) in particular waves.
As long as you can make the envelope airtight (and rigid), airship performances improve with scale thanks to the cube-square law. The limiting factor is the factory: they aren’t hangars big enough to make bigger airships, so you’d need an industry with predictable demand for larger ships.
The Hindenburg could carry 232 metric tons aside from its own weight and the weight of its gas, or this was its total maximum tonnage?
There's a reason commercial providers haven't been building them. There's a reason distracted silicon valley billionaires are.
A 747 can’t stay in the air indefinitely. An airship can refuel and resupply without the owner even being aware.
He can park it 5 miles off the coast and stay there forever. A 747 can’t do this.
I'm neither a billionaire nor am I expecting to ever become one (unless we'll get hit by hyperinflation and start denominating banknotes in scientific notation), and I've always been happy to sneer at the huge yachts and villas of the super-rich, on the grounds of those things being wasteful excess. But sneering at them for pumping money into useful scientific and technological advances that are otherwise currently not interesting to regular market economy? That's just self-defeating, and smells of petty jealousy.
Living on a giant airship would be like having the highest penthouse apartment in the world, and the most amazing views. And you can move it when you get bored.
But in keeping up with the Musks', I can see billionares competing with each other to have more extravagant homes in even more exotic locations, like in an airship, or an underwater base.
Some even have smaller yachts inside their super yachts.
Because there is no law at sea.
Haven't you heard what happens on these yachts? Crazy sex, kink, drugs. Even tales of slavery and murder.
> Living on a giant airship
Even a mild gust would cause trouble. You have to be incredibly mindful of the weather.
https://www.businessinsider.com/superyacht-sex-crew-sexual-h...
https://www.stylist.co.uk/long-reads/yachting-hollywood-traf...
https://www.cosmopolitan.com/uk/reports/a38053431/yacht-girl...
I've read multiple articles (but can't seem to find links to them) that threats of throwing unwilling parties overboard are used to silence and coerce.
Seems pretty lawless to me.
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Diagram_of_Hindenbur...
The ports were fine; what we had trouble sourcing was labourers, water, food, and building supplies.
He’d do a lot more good by repurposing a super-yacht as a passenger ferry, tbh.
> Brin runs a separate non-profit, called Global Support and Development, that has already carried out such missions by sea, in the Caribbean, Latin American and the South Pacific. It originally used Brin’s own superyacht to ferry medical personnel to the scene of hurricanes and other disasters, and recently launched a purpose built vessel capable of transporting dozens of medical staff and full-size shipping containers.
Maybe the intent is to reach areas inland that are inaccessible by plane, automobile, or helicopter?
I’m not saying airships are better than water ships all the time, but there are certainly real use cases for being able to drop tons of cargo in a lightly improved landing field.
We take for granted that cargo planes and ships can skirt a tropical storm and sneak in while the trees are still dripping. A dirigible is a fair weather friend. It cannot arrive until relief efforts are well underway. That doesn’t make them useless, but it also doesn’t make them useful.
Food and water are good, though we have a lot stockpiled already, but it’s easy to underestimate how tough things can get in the summer when there’s no A/C or refrigeration in the supermarkets. Heck, it took us a week to get a gas station back online in ‘04, cars and trucks were abandoned on the roads.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USS_Macon_(ZRS-5)
In general the US had a lot of pretty bad airship accidents, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_airship_accidents
A hint: The 1914 M-class Zeppelin (158 metre) had about 9 metric tons of useful load.
A small "Handysize" (around 150 metre) cargo ship can carry around 40,000 metric tons.
A 747 cargo plane (76 metre) has about 100 tons of useful load, and will be there faster.
Also, there are a lot of even smaller cargo ships making deliveries to islands. Many of those have cranes for offloading containers to ports without infrastructure.
Sort of? It was a startup that went bankrupt before building its first product. The light bulb was also "tried" 50 years before Edison. There's something to be said for trying again.
But I wonder if Cargolifter would still be such a dud in today's market? Just look at the crazy lengths companies go through to put the largest possible wind turbines in remote locations. Seriously, if you've never done so (or if it's been a few years), enter "turbine blade transportation" in the image search of your choice and be awed. I can't imagine Cargolifter not having a waiting list measured in decades given the pains ground based blade transportation goes through, and those things aren't even that heavy. Currently, inland wind turbine size is clearly limited by transportation, not by materials or engineering. (and larger turbines are actually less annoying than smaller ones, because rpm go down with size due to blade tips approaching transonic speeds at any non-trivial size)
Right, but sometimes the only way for it to change is for someone to burn through enough money to drag the market kicking and screaming into embracing a new/better type of products. Recent example: Tesla and electric cars.
Whether or not something would be a useful/successful product, and whether the market can, on its own, get to that point from where it is now, are two distinct considerations.
but calling it a "floating city" is silly. the blimp might be 124m long, but the cabin is basically a sprinter van. https://airandspace.si.edu/sites/default/files/2023-09/21ZD_...
Helium is used in medical applications for cooling magnets in MRIs - I found the quote "An MRI unit requires approximately 2,000 liters of liquid helium to keep the magnet cool enough to operate." [2] This is interesting to be because, in a helium shortage, healthcare applications probably get high priority.
Liquid helium has an expansion ratio of 1:745 [3], so the 2000 liters of liquid helium for an MRI is the equivalent of ~1.5 million liters of helium gas.
I can't find the exact volume of helium the Pathfinder 1 requires, but their website says "Pathfinder 1 is 400 feet long and 66 feet wide" [4], which modeled as a cylinder gives a displacement of about ~38 million liters.
So, my rough estimate is that an airship needs as much helium as ~25 MRI machines (with a high margin for error).
To me, that seems like a lot of helium - I bet society would prefer 25 MRIs to 1 airship.
[1] https://www.nbcnews.com/health/health-news/helium-shortage-d...
[2] https://www.rsna.org/news/2023/january/helium-shortage-for-m...
just like we were afraid of peak oil until we broke through the price barrier to distilling oil from tar sands and suddenly there's plenty of oil to go around as long as people are willing to pay $80/barrel ?
I’d rather we let Sergei fly his balloon. Maybe if we run out of helium doctors can go back to working instead of helping their imaging partners make bank on MRI machines.
And if not a pure vacuum about using regular air and then pumping out the air until you reach a partial vacuum that meets your current lifting needs?
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vacuum_airship
[2] Quantity estimates taken from first DuckDuckGo result which didn't look ad-filled: https://socratic.org/questions/is-hydrogen-more-or-less-dens...
I really like the idea of evacuated structural members, but it doesn’t seem practical. Even internal bracing might be better exposed to the lifting gas rather than made air tight.
But is there a sweet spot where running 0.# atmospheres of hydrogen or helium inside of a braced envelope results in lower mass per unit volume? If the skin can handle 2 psi surely it can also handle -2 psi?
And I have no interest in people who are always sitting on the fence.
Vacuum airships largely show up in sci-fi, as a sign that someone is showing off (they require absolute magic materials technology, but aren't really all that useful). Iain M Banks liked them.
Theoretically, but you'd be incentivized to cut weight as much as possible in the pressure vessel department... might as well put OceanGate logos on the control surfaces.
A back-of-the-envelope calculation shows that a 100m sphere would have 600 million pounds of force on its surface area.
I'm not sure if Google is fixable at this point, though I agree with the sentiment; the financial incentives were always pulling this way, even if Google wasn't itself selling advertising, and even if generative AI wasn't better than spam-content detection AI.
Shareholders want big number go bigger so they can cash out, why would they care about the state of Google ten years from now?
During the transition phase of loading and unloading, tethering to ground seems like it would make things easier.
Still cheaper and more flexible than equipment at an existing seaport.
It’s not that hard to imagine that weight being return trip cargo or seawater in worst case.
At some level [1] that mix is not flammable. That will add at least some additional payload.
[1] https://h2tools.org/bibliography/experimental-study-safety-h...
We can't mention airships without mentioning the Hindenburg. This[1] was the cockpit of the Hindenburg's sister ship Graf Zeppelin, yep flying technology hasn't improved since then or anything. And Brin's airship isn't even Hydrogen lifted!
[1] https://www.gettyimages.co.uk/detail/news-photo/photograph-f...
It is surprising how 90 some years later we aren't even close to matching the size, though clearly the technology has advanced greatly. Even with the new tech and power efficiency, the speed is still slower (60 knots vs 67 for the Hindenburg).
The 1/3 of the occupants of the Hindenburg than did die (the remaining 2/3 survived) died because they couldn't escape the wreckage _on the ground_.
I do think the more accurate thing to compare to are diesel submarines. A fire there is going to be even worse than one in a zeppelin (unless that zeppelin is over the ocean).
- In the event of a fuel leak you can stop a car within seconds and evacuate, that isn't possible with a flying device
Once we figure out how to do fusion power, helium won't be in limited supply anymore.
> "In the event of a fuel leak you can stop a car within seconds and evacuate, that isn't possible with a flying device"
Have you read the details of the Hindenburg disaster? If not, would you be surprised to learn that most of the people on board survived?[2] Compare with Wikipedia's list of commercial aircraft disasters[3] and the survival rate of those. And the sheer quantity of accidents, for that matter. (And Hydrogen in airships isn't a fuel, and it can be vented out of the top of the bags far away from the people in the gondola below, and anyway leaking Hydrogen goes upwards and away).
[1] https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20210401-the-worlds-first...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hindenburg_disaster
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_accidents_and_incident...
Don't fly over cities, and the worst (likely) case scenario is you lose a load.
Airships.net has a list of Hydrogen airship fires[1] and I question how many of them could be avoided, and how many accidents that is in comparison to early aeroplane accidents of 1908-1937; Wikipedia has a very long list of aircraft accidents[2]. Some of the fires are very avoidable - cleaning the gondola with gasoline, for example. I wonder what happened with 'static from the rubber bags igniting the gas' - was there a gas leak from a tear in the bags? Through the bag material? Gas buildup inside the canopy? Oxygen leaking into the bags making an air/gas mix inside? "Torn from its temporary mooring by wind" - is that avoidable today? "suffered in-flight structural failure over the city of Hull, England and crashed into the River Humber where it ignited", "ignited when it hit high-tension electrical wires", the R101 was a bad design modified in a rush to meet a political deadline.
It might be that this really is unavoidably dangerous, but the advantages of Hydrogen for its extra lifting power and affordability and renewability make me want to see some good engineers and safety officers, with today's tech and air travel safety experience, work the problem for a few years and see how safe it could become.
[1] https://www.airships.net/hydrogen-airship-accidents/
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_accidents_and_incident...
The reference to the Hindenburg is always calling to mind the big fire. The Hindenburg was 245m long, the Graf Zeppelin was 236m long. Would it be so bad to say "Sergey Brin's airship is the biggest since the days of the Graf Zeppelin"? or "One of the biggest since the days of the giant German Zeppelins of the 1930s"? Just comparing it straight out to one of the most famous disaster photos of the last century is ... an unfair and unnecessary kick. In what other fields would we get an instant comparison to a tragedy from a hundred years ago, every single time?
[1] Most of the airships of the time - British, French, American - were rubbish and broke apart or failed in various ways killing everyone onboard. How come the Graf Zeppelin was so incredibly succesful? This is like the stories of ye olde greybeards who built one incredible system in LISP in the 1970s and it has never been replicated before or since. What actually caused the Graf Zeppelin to be so anomalously good - was it Dr Hugo Eckener, was it procedures, was it something in the regulation or lack of, or government support or lack of, or some especially clever or suitable designer, or something in the manufacturing, or what?
How will they get the airship to the relevant region? It doesn't fly very fast (and presumably doesn't have incredible range, so would need to stop for refueling/recharging).
300KW is 1500 m2 solar panels at 200 W/m2 which given the airship's length of 120 m means 15m width - i.e. the airship can just be covered with those lightweight flexible solar panels (with 1500m2 of those solar panels weighting about the same as those 2 diesels and say 300 gallons of fuel) and be self-sustainable for unlimited flight time.
I like that they are being used for aid, but I’m curious why they couldn’t also be extended to commuter travel? Is it not cost effective?
It takes an airship a while to take off, land, get up to speed, slow down from top speed
Not sure whether the latency is suitable for commute
Edit: hmm now that I think of it, so does a ferry, and a good amount of people commute by ferry in SF..
That's...not a lot, is it? Compared to a Chinook or MI-26 or whatever. And it's huge and impractical. But it looks cool!
My only suggestion is to build them out of cellular swarm robots.
How does this work?
Reminds me slightly of this xkcd https://xkcd.com/2128/
Just tell us you just wanted to build a big airship.
Sounds like he figured out how to write off his superyacht
https://www.npr.org/2019/11/01/775554343/the-world-is-consta...
I'm a total amateur here.
Is there no hope of finding a new source of helium?
Is there any opportunity for airship gasses that are reasonably competitive to helium but have a much more abundant supply? Is helium the only possible such gas (besides hydrogen)? Are competing gases 30% less efficient or 3,000% less?
Not on Earth, or anywhere in the Solar System except the interior of the Sun, as far as I know. Mining the Sun's core for helium is unlikely to be practical any time soon. :-)
> Is there any opportunity for airship gasses that are reasonably competitive to helium but have a much more abundant supply?
No. The problem is weight. More specifically, the weight of the airship in total including the gas inside, compared to the weight of an equal volume of air. So obviously any gas that is as heavy as or heavier than air won't do. And that only leaves, by my count, three possible gases that aren't already in air, that are lighter than air at all. The comparative weights are, roughly speaking:
Hydrogen: 2 Helium: 4 Neon: 20 Air: 29
So the maximum amount of weight available for all the rest of the airship--its structure, engines, passengers, cargo, etc.--would be, roughly speaking:
Hydrogen: 27/29 Helium: 25/29 Neon: 9/29
The hydrogen case is known to be easily doable, but of course it also has the huge downside of flammability.
The helium case is doable, but not easily: once you've done the structure and engines, the weight left over for any kind of payload, i.e., passengers and/or cargo, is not very much.
The neon case is simply not practical: there isn't even enough weight left over for a reasonable structure, let alone engines and payload.
There are helium-3 deposits on the moon. That's what the new space race is about. Bezos wants to mine helium on the moon...
Here is a Wikipedia discussion of alternative lifting gases: