Re: Bike to Anywhere Day Redux

On 5/17/2025 11:08 AM, pH wrote:

On 2025-05-16, Frank Krygowski <frkrygow@gXXmail.com> wrote:

On 5/15/2025 8:25 PM, sms wrote:

Bike to Anywhere Day Redux
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Interestingly, I was on some of those same roads and trails this week.
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That wasn't a blimp. It was LTA Research's Pathfinder 1 rigid airship.
(A blimp is limp.) It's the largest flying machine currently existing. I
watched one flight from the northern end of the Stevens Creek preserve,
near GooglePlex. I've got contacts at LTA, and was given a facility tour
last Friday.
>
(Yep, look at me!)

  Holy Hindenberg, Batman, I didn't know there were any dirigibles flying.
 It seems to be a disappeared part of history that there was indeed a few
years of the big ships flying hither and yon.

There are several companies betting on the usefulness of large airships. LTA is (mostly?) funded by Sergey Brin of Google, but there's also Flying Whales (in France) and others. Washington Post did a big article on this a few days ago. There are proposals to use the technology for disaster relief (dropping tons of relief supplies or cargo where infrastructure has been destroyed), airlifting harvested timber out of inaccessible forests, transporting immense cargo like wind turbine blades, etc. And BTW, the Zeppelin company still exists.
Most people don't know how successful the old Zeppelins were. Hindenburg flew across oceans and around the world, successfully handling bad weather, navigation, etc. without modern technology. But we'll see if companies like LTA can find a niche.

slightly related, I recall reading that Helium supplies may be diminishing.
Of course we can make all the Hydrogen we want, but there's the "boom"
factor.

IIRC, helium is harvested during natural gas production. It's expensive, but I doubt it's going away.
I also think it's feasible to use hydrogen. The TV series Nova once did a program that talked about the controversy regarding the crash of the Hindenburg. There's strong speculation that the very flammable skin of the craft was the root cause of the disaster. Hydrogen burns, but it doesn't explode unless pre-mixed with air. Burning hydrogen from an airship or balloon would produce flames that were barely visible, with the heat rising pretty slowly upwards.
Gasoline or kerosene are probably more hazardous!
--
- Frank Krygowski