The notion of using these for disaster relief is really a great benefit to society. Imagine islands in the Caribbean or south east Asia impacted by a hurricane, typhoon, tsunami etc and cannot receive supplies. There is a very real need there.
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.
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.
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.
> 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?
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.