Re: Bike to Anywhere Day Redux

Am 17.05.2025 um 21:25 schrieb Frank Krygowski:

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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<snip>

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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.
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(Yep, look at me!)

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Holy Hindenberg, Batman, I didn't know there were any dirigibles flying.
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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.

I thought the bakrupcty of
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CargoLifter>
in 2002 put an end to that ---oops, they still exist?
<https://www.cargolifter.com/en/company/>