The world’s largest aircraft breaks cover in Silicon Valley::As dawn breaks over Silicon Valley, the world is getting its first look at Pathfinder 1, a prototype electric airship that its maker LTA Research hopes
Look at all the advertising space on the side of that baby.
Enjoy the good life on the Offworld Colonies!
This is the best summary I could come up with:
As dawn breaks over Silicon Valley, the world is getting its first look at Pathfinder 1, a prototype electric airship that its maker LTA Research hopes will kickstart a new era in climate-friendly air travel, and accelerate the humanitarian work of its funder, Google co-founder Sergey Brin.
The airship — its snow-white steampunk profile visible from the busy 101 highway — has taken drone technology such as fly-by-wire controls, electric motors and lidar sensing, and supersized them to something longer than three Boeing 737s, potentially able to carry tons of cargo over many hundreds of miles.
This morning, the airship floated silently from its WW2-era hangar at NASA’s Moffett Field at walking pace, steered by ropes held by dozens of the company’s engineers, technicians and ground crew.
The first lesson its engineers hope to learn is how Pathfinder 1’s approximately one million cubic feet of helium and weather resistant polymer skin will respond to the warming effect of Californian sunshine.
At the start of September, the FAA issued a special airworthiness certificate for the Pathfinder 1 allowing test flights in and around Moffett Field and the nearby Palo Alto airport, and over the southern part of the San Francisco Bay.
That will involve a long, slow slog to validate the new technologies and to demonstrate, to the FAA and paying customers, that a new generation of super-large airships can match the generally excellent safety and reliability record of today’s commercial jets.
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approximately one million cubic feet of helium
They won’t get far unless they learn to use metric.
/SCNR
Pretty excited about this project.
Ha, yes let’s use a limited resource (helium) to save the earth!
No, I don’t have a better idea… and maybe the improvement is worth it. After all I’ll be dead in 100-200 years when helium runs out on Earth, but climate change is already having a huge impact.
Hydrogen would make more sense, but people are scared of it. Hydrogen craft are actually pretty safe. I think the British tried to use incendiary rounds to ignite hydrogen craft but there was too little oxygen so they wouldn’t burn. They switched to a mix of incendiary and regular round to create holes for airflow before igniting.
Hydrogen makes more sense, but it’s still derived from methane. Not getting away from fossil fuels. And methane is a potent green house gas, far more than carbon dioxide. Any industrial uses for methane will surely have accidental emissions.
Well, it’s currently generated using methane because it’s the most efficient option available. In a world with 100% clean energy with extra capacity available, electrical decomposition of water gets you hydrogen (and a little oxygen to use for something else if you want).
I concur. This is really fucking stupid. The only actual advantage that airships have is loitering time, and solar aeroplanes can already loiter for months albeit with a small payload.
If you really care about the environment, make it an unmanned post and use more efficient (because it’s lighter) and abundant hydrogen. Chance of explosion is pretty low, and if it does who cares.
Afaik they want to use hydrogen, it is actually pretty safe with modern understanding, but regulations make it hard to pursue.
I think people that dismiss hydrogen airships as impossible to make safe because of the Hindenburg miss that planes of that era weren’t super safe either, but have been made quite safe today, and that planes are filled with large amounts of flammable fuel. I personally think we should give them another shot.
Right? I’m embarrassed that we still think hydrogen to be more dangerous than gasoline and other fossil fuels.
I mean, hydrogen is dangerous, as are most things, but it likely won’t ever kill 5~10 million people per year from pollution alone.
And regarding airships, hydrogen doesn’t just explode as some like to think, and won’t just plummet In case of fire if sealed in multiple metallic and flame resistant compartments like in modern airships, at least not without a freak accident.
I mean, don’t airships also have the advantage of not needing to expend energy for lift, just forward motion? A solar plane doesn’t have to worry about this either I suppose, but an airship is much easier to make have useful cargo capacity than a solar plane.
Neither do naval ships.
I can only see this being useful over land and short distances.
That massive size and slowness and expensive material and depleting helium can only haul 8,000 pounds beyond its crew. For comparison, the most common passenger jet there is; the Boeing 737 can haul around like 50,000 pounds depending on how much fuel is on board.
It’s a cool concept, but I can’t fathom it ever doing a whole lot of good. The more carbon neutral appropriate thing to do that would be a viable option would be for jets to use a different fuel source. Maybe massive solar arrays at airports used to create liquid hydrogen and craft designed to run on that instead of jet fuel. I don’t really know myself, but I know there’s no way anything other than very niche scenarios will crazy huge expensive zeppelins be used.
Wonder how such a large and slowly maneuvered craft will fare against the more unpredictable and strong weather associated with climate change.
The crew capacity seems to be limited for its size. Compared with airships from a century ago. No smoking salon :-) etc. Maybe its the helium instead of hydrogen?.
The Hindenburg had 50 sleeping cabins.
I’d be really excited for a vacuum ship
They need to use this as their commercial: https://youtu.be/8_xaSom3Lro
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https://piped.video/8_xaSom3Lro
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source; check me out at GitHub.
Not as large as the Cargolifter, which has only been built as 1:8 model for testing, but still impressing.
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I don’t think that the Imperial Star Destroyer qualifies as air ship.
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I just stated that there was a more ambitious project that would have worked, but unfortunately ran out of money. I am impressed that Pathfinder 1 was actually built.
Ok? You can’t really call it the largest airship when it was never built.
I propose a new airship design called Cargohauler, it’s basically a Cargolifter but scaled up 2x. Your puny Cargolifter is nothing in comparison to my Cargohauler
This just in, I am proposing a new design called the JumboPumper. It is like your puny Cargohauler, but 4x as large!
I just stated that there was a more ambitious project that would have worked, but unfortunately ran out of money. I am impressed that Pathfinder 1 was actually built.
One-upping is aggressive. The better way to say it would be: “there was a more ambitious project that would have worked, but unfortunately ran out of money”.
OK. I didn’t intend to sound aggressive.
Pathfinder 1 is only built at 1:10 scale though, so it’s actually much larger than Cargolifter.
The article states Pathfinder 1 is 124 m long, but does not say that its a 1:10 model. However, Cargolifter CL160 would have been 260 m long.
