This will be entertaining, kind of steam punk like.
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.
He has the advantage of knowing what is there and they can create an arrangement to license or sell the IP to another entity… if it’s just gathering dust, why not?
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.
> and costs 1/10th what helium does to source and supply.
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.
It seems like a nice bonus that hydrogen can also be used as fuel. All the hydrogen used for buoyancy control somewhat obviates the need to haul another liquid fuel or heavy batteries.
I’m first reminded of final fantasy games. They (at least used to) always have a guy called Cid who would give you a airship to hop around the map quickly
> "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
if that were true, then we'd all have switched to nuclear. Of course cost is a consideration, but Germany is a great example of irrationally changing course on power generation
I love airships, but we really seem to be hitting peak something when billionaires can not just live in their floating city (124 meters long), forever.
I can’t wait for the jet packing up and down for parties and whatnot.
The most meaningful application for airships is to carry blades, nacelles, and towers for wind turbines off-shore. Direct transport from the factory to the farm would greatly simplify installation.
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.
Not an expert, but I suspect that getting them from the factory to the dock (and finding a dock that would not be a nightmare to maneuver through) is a pretty significant part of the challenge
Land transport is the limiting part: you have to limit size to bridge heights and road width standards that are driven by how wide horse arses were in Roman times.
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.
I think that had more to do with weight. As far as I can tell, there weren't any good options to transport heavy goods over land before trains. A barge on a canal will transport a lot more weight than carts and wagons pulled by animals will.
Honestly I could see airships as being better to deliver components to wind farms under construction on land. It can often be quite a logistical hassle to move the massively over-length items like blades or tower sections over the road.
I wonder how much cargo these can haul. Comparable more to what current jets haul or what the giant China to US cargo ships haul. I would imagine the first
Most of the current ones can carry about a ton and a half, but larger ones would be able to carry a lot more: the Hindenburg could carry 232 t, for instance. The largest blades nowadays are 12 t; the nacelle with the transformer is the expensive bit; those can be as much as 55 t. The tower is more (twice that), but it’s usually transported as rings of 10-20 t each.
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.
>Most of the current ones can carry about a ton and a half, but larger ones would be able to carry a lot more: the Hindenburg could carry 232 t, for instance.
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?
Think if it can move a whole wind turbine intact. A thousand tons maybe?
Then just sail back and forth. If each turbine is 15 megawatts nameplate capacity and you install 3 per day, work 200 days per year that might be 10 gigawatts per year.
Why not? Billionaires surely want to do all the things randos on the Internet don't like (or are jealous of), because they are the Evil Bad No-Good Billionaires.
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.
You're thinking of millionaires yachts. Brin's Dragonfly, with its movie theater and helipad, and Page's Senses, with 6 cabins for guests and 7 for crew, are bigger than most people's houses.
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.
Whats your defintion of cramped? Their yachts are as long as a football field and also have "Support Vessels" to carry all the crap (i.e. Jet Skis) so they don't clutter the yacht.
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.
Well, the drones to kill off the huddled masses that attack as mass starvation and chaos sets in would be a bit expensive. Plus it kind of kills the party mood.
Not really. An A380 cabin is about 3x as long and its maximum width is greater. (The cabins on the Hindenburg were very small--78″ x 66″--which may make the floor plan look bigger than it was just looking at a drawing.)
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.
> 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?
Often ports are fine, but in the Maui fire aftermath for example a lack of significant port infrastructure was frequently cited as a barrier to fast recovery.
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.
The goal of relief efforts is to get food and especially water in as quickly as possible. Three days without fresh water and you’re already dealing with pathogens.
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.
Don’t underestimate the importance of building supplies and labor.
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.
That's something a Navy is traditionally good for, especially the US Navy with our ridiculously huge carriers. They're great at sitting off the coast and acting as a logistics hub for transferring between planes and helicopters that can get into more devastated areas. The big issue with a blimp for that for me seems to be that they're very slow and can only operate in moderate conditions both of which aren't really guaranteed in a disaster situation.
Agreed, the only disaster situations I can think of where an airship might have use are earthquake and war zones, which are often hard to reach by vehicle or plane, and may have calm enough weather to support an airship.
They'd be great at secondary recovery once they get into place but they're so slow you can't use them for the immediate recovery and life saving efforts unless they're immediately in the area.
A Zeppelin NT can reach up to 125 km/h, that's way faster than any truck can possibly reach in a disaster zone. The only thing faster and as versatile is a select breed of cargo choppers like the Mi-26 (Russia) and the CH-53K (US), but flying choppers comes with risks on its own from rotor downwash.
They could maybe act like mini versions of the hospital ships run by the US and others for inland areas beyond the reach of ship based care. Still kind of runs into the response speed issue. In the time it takes a blimp to trundle over from wherever it's stored helicopters can deploy a lot of materiel.
Pathfinder 1 airship is supposed to carry 28 tons. That is a single fully loaded 40 ft container.
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.
Sounds just about right sized to get off-shore grade wind turbine blades to remote inland hills. The benefit of larger turbines is even bigger inland than off-shore, but inland is severely limited by transport, because (unlike the tower) those blades can't realistically be built from subassemblies on-site.
no need to wait, helicopter tech is good enough for nearly all situations, some billions would help enough, rather than investing those into some kind of pipedream. Cargolifter already tried.
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.
Sometimes all that needs to change is market demand. Cargolifter was a solution looking for a problem. "It might be useful for disaster relief?" even more so, but given Brin-grade money, solutions looking for a problem are certainly better than yet another yacht.
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)
> Sometimes all that needs to change is market demand.
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.
Helicopters (and planes) flying off a ship just offshore are able to do far more than an airship could, as has already been remarked elsewhere in this discussion.
Interesting that it uses helium. With a helium shortage [1], I'm concerned about the long-term viability of an airship - so I ran some numbers to understand it better.
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.
isn't the helium shortage affected by the market price of helium?
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 doubt society cares that much about MRIs seeing how wasteful they are when used for preventative care. I’ve personally witnessed people get 5 MRIs to diagnose a health condition and still come up short.
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.
Since we always choose the lightest / least dense possible lifting gas, would it be possibly to use a pure vacuum as a lifting gas? You'd need an insanely strong cover and internal structure, but would it theoretically work?
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?
Pure vacuum would work[1] but Hydrogen is already very sparse at atmospheric pressure. Swapping 22 litres of air at 28 grams for Hydrogen gets you 22 litres of Hydrogen at 2 grams[2]. That's 93% of the mass gone at much the same pressure so you can contain it in an easy bag. Swapping that Hydrogen for vacuum knocks off 2 grams but you nead a much stronger (heavier) container, and risk a massive implosion in the case of damage.
You’d have to have internal baffles that slowed the implosion down, which would increase the weight more and also mean you aren’t going to achieve particularly hard vacuum. The internet tells me that a soda can weighs 14 grams, and those are only strong under tension, and hold half a liter.
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?
Another option would be to float the craft on a denser fluid, which means the lifting gas could be lighter. For example, most of the Earth is covered in salt water, perhaps we could design some sort of “water ship.”
We've tried this but the heavier fluid surrounding such craft requires so much more structural strength that it's just not worth it for anything but niche applications like stealth or viewing the bottom of the sea floor.
And I have no interest in people who are always sitting on the fence.
Even if you could build it so that it is positively buoyant you're only saving a 1-2 grams per liter of helium you replace with vacuum. He and H are extremely good at being light filler gasses.
It would work, if you had magic impossible materials, yes. However it wouldn't actually provide _that_ much more lift than hydrogen.
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.
Also if you had those magic impossible materials, you could probably use even less of them with hydrogen for greater lift than more of them with a vacuum.
Think about atmospheric pressure, it is 14.7 PSI at the ground so your envelope has to be extremely strong to hold that pressure differential if you want to use vacuum instead of filling it with a lighter gas. Helium is only 0.1786 g/L at STP. So unless you're saving more weight than that over your entire envelope it's better to just fill it with a gas and have a significantly lighter lifting envelope.
The Diamond Age involves that, surrounded by 3D printed diamond. No idea how quickly nitrogen would actually diffuse across three inches of diamond with a 1-ATM pressure difference, but it sure sounded cool.
> Since we always choose the lightest / least dense possible lifting gas, would it be possibly to use a pure vacuum as a lifting gas? You'd need an insanely strong cover and internal structure, but would it theoretically work?
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.
Does he even own enough shares to do that if he wanted to? (I genuinely don't know, it isn't clear from his Wikipedia page).
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.
My understanding is that Google’s stock structure was set up specifically to allows Sergey and Larry to retain a majority in terms of voting rights when combined.
Google is still a colossal money printer. Since that’s the only real goal of the people who own it (the shareholders), what’s broken that needs to be fixed?
If you owned a significant percentage of google, what would you sell it for that would be worth more than google in ten years if it was optimized for value in ten years?
This video was good and helped me understand it's not just lifting, but what happens when it drops the lifted object. The main issue is after you drop the weight the ship will take off into the sky if it doesn't vent or compress gas, both are non-trivial processes that require significant cost, waste or energy.
Perhaps this is a stupid question but couldn't you just tether it down? I suppose this would not be ideal for very rudimentary landing zones but depending on the forces involved would cleats embedded in concrete be sufficient?
> "That piece of paper allows the largest aircraft since the ill-fated Hindenburg"
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!
In the context of that sentence, the Hindenburg is mentioned as is/was the largest aircraft ever built at 245 m (804 ft) length. Pathfinder 1 is about half that at about 123 m.
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).
I would like us to eventually get back to hydrogen though. It has more lift and isn't in limited supply. If we can drive around with 20 gallons of gasoline under our butts, we can probably figure out how to fly around with hydrogen above our heads.
I mean for the most part we did figure out how to fly with hydrogen above our heads.
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).
Hydrogen balloons shouldn't be pressurized, the last thing you want is more mass in the same volume, that would make it less buoyant. Hydrogen doesn't explode, it's only Hydrogen + Oxygen mixtures that can explode, so an airship with intact gasbags regularly checked to contain pure Hydrogen can be at very low risk of sudden explosion. Hydrogen is allowed in airoplanes to propel them forwards[1], why not in airships to propel them upwards as well?
> "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).
Why don't fly over cities? Aeroplanes fly over cities and they're full of jet fuel. Hydrogen fuelled aeroplanes can fly over cities.
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.
That photo is of the original Graf Zeppelin from 1924, the Hindenburg's sister ship was LZ 130 Graf Zeppelin launched in 1938. I'm struggling to find a photo of the Hindenburg-class cockpit.
It was good enough to get the Graf Zeppelin to be the first vehicle to fly around the world, first vehicle to fly a million miles[1] and so on, but it comes from a time where the captain steered it with a ship's wheel, shouted down a pipe to men in the engine nacelles to adjust the engine speeds by hand, dangled a wire out below the ship to make radio contact, used audible pings to the ground below and listening for the echo delay to determine altitude, and a rope attached to a valve to let the Hydrogen out of the bags to descend, and water ballast to release to ascend. It's primitive compared to the vast improvements in air vehicle design, sensors, computers and safety technology between 1930 and today.
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?
Have you seen the cockpit of modern plane? The number of controls/instruments telling you about the status of the plane for instance is a big differentiator here. That is a major safety flag -- the pilot in that cockpit knows nothing really about the ship he is steering.
I’ll bet you it looks exactly like a plane. You aren’t going to get FAA clearance without aviation rated parts, and you wouldn’t make them from scratch for no reason.
i believe OP's point is: the reference to the hindenburg could be seen as a cheap swipe implying that the new vehicle is destined to repeat history; however, modern aviation involves a lot more safety equipment and redundancy.
> Ultimately, LTA intends its aircraft to be used for humanitarian missions, deploying cargo and personnel to areas that are inaccessible by road.
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).
>Pathfinder 1 has a hybrid propulsion system, with two 150 kilowatt diesel generators working alongside 24 batteries to provide power for the electric motors
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.
It’s a reasonable idea in practice, but they can’t carry that much weight, so either you land often for showers or water would have to be recycled. They can have a lot of power by having the top covered in flexible solar panels (ignoring the risk of a spark) so you can run reverse osmosis… but it might be a tough sell.
came across a related article recently that explored the economics and physics of airships [1]. seems like a monumental undertaking to actually bring to market but the principles seem sound
Helium is expensive, which is why they are considering Hydrogen. Yes, that’s what was in the Hindenburg, and yes, it can go big boom, but that’s the idea.
> 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
Sounds like he figured out how to write off his superyacht
Man has income. Man owes income tax. Man writes off income tax due to his largess in buying himself a large boat beacuse he let's orphans on it once a month.
I was hoping somebody would chime in on the sustainability of helium for airships.
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?
> Is there no hope of finding a new source of helium?
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.
Hm, interesting. Helium-3 would be better than Helium-4 (which is what I assumed in the numbers I gave), its weight is halfway between Helium-4 and Hydrogen gas.
Fusion and fission breeders are expected to create helium to some degree. No idea if it’s even worth mentioning here, but basically we’ll get more by atom manipulation and that’s it.
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-...