Technological Flights Of Fancy That Fizzled

prostoalex writes "MSNBC's Alan Boyle takes a look at seven futuristic dreams for the past that never managed to materialize into anything substantial in this 21st century. At the top of the list are flying cars, with personal jetpacks, passenger airships, supersonic commercial flights, space travel and colonies, with propulsion breakthroughs completing the list."

Comments

Passenger airships

[ericspinder]

It was a pretty good article, but very weak on the Hindenburg details, many people seem to aggree these days that it was not the hydrogen that exploded, but the fabric.

Of course the Hindenburg is a fine example of how important a picture could be. Only thirty seven people died (97 lived), yet the burning fireball caught on film managed to kill decent method of long range travel. Of course there are a couple of other problems with airships, like they don't do too well in strong winds, and they take a lot of "man handling" at the field, but in some applications they might make good sense.

Re:Passenger airships

[Evil Adrian]

Here's a link to some research into what actually happened.

From the page: "We can say with the utmost certainly that the Hindenburg disaster of May 6, 1937 was caused by the very fabric of the great vessel itself."

Re:Passenger airships

[drakaan]

The highly flamabble cloth you're scoffing at was coated with (among other things) powdered aluminum. For those of you who didn't already know, that's the key combustible component in solid rocket fuel. There has been at least one pretty good special on Discovery about it, and they tested some of the fabric to see if they could reproduce the results. Here are some things I recall from that special:

• The skin of the dirigible was coated with powdered aluminum (aluminum oxide?)
• There were special vents at the top of the blimp to vent leaking hydrogen
• Hydrogen burns in a hard-to-see blue flame
• solid rocket fuel burns a bright reddish-orange
• the hindenburg burned a bright reddish-orange

There was a lot more to the show than that, but I was sufficiently convinced that the dirigible's skin did them in, not the Hydrogen.

Re:Passenger airships

[WolfWithoutAClause]

The fabric wasn't merely flammable, it contained both aluminum powder and iron oxide. That combination is called 'thermite', and it needs no oxygen to react; so the fabric was approximately explosive.

Re:Passenger airships

[Waffle Iron]

Of course there are a couple of other problems with airships, like they don't do too well in strong winds, and they take a lot of "man handling" at the field

That's an understatement. When you need a vehicle almost as large as the Titanic to move a few dozen passengers at 80 mph max, you know you've going to have a hard time maintaining profit margins.

What's worse is the tendency for these things to get literally ripped apart any time they wander too near a wind storm. This happened to a couple of U.S. Navy helium-filled airships, as well as quite a few others from other countries.

I don't have the exact stats, but my understanding is that there were more crashes and disintegrations of dirigibles than fireballs. It also seems like more of them ended up crashing than retiring gracefully.

The new ships don't need a large ground crew.

[Moderation abuser]

A 1/3 chance of surviving a jet crash? Nope.

The new airships like the Zeppelin NT and the ATG machines can use vectored thrust to reduce the number of ground crew required, the power/size ratio and construction methodology is also enough to allow flight in much stronger winds than the first generation machines at the start of the 20th century. They can operate within similar weather conditions to other aircraft like helicopters and light aeroplanes.

http://www.zeppelin-nt.com/pages/D/bilder_u_thum .h tm

The airship wasn't killed from long range travel just by the film of the Hindenberg disaster, though it certainly didn't help. The much higher speed and lower cost of the aeroplanes did more damage and I don't see that changing for A->B travel in the near future.

I think however there's a niche similar to the one cruise liners operate within which I believe airships could fill. A world cruise on something like the Hindenberg would be absolutely fantastic. Then there's the obvious military/police patrol and observation platforms.

Re:Went to the moon .. and then .... ummmm.......

[drinkypoo]

We really don't know if we could terraform any of the other planets in our solar system into something human-viable in a reasonable short period of time, say just a few hundred years. We certainly won't know if we don't get more information. The best way to rapidly get more information is to send a bunch of humans to other planets and have them conduct studies. The primary target for such an endeavor because of its currently relatively earth-like conditions (compared to other planets in the solar system) is of course Mars.

Profitability is not the only criteria which should be considered in which government projects to fund and which not. The space program has helped advance many branches of science. Unfortunately it's been doing pretty much the same thing for too long now - the farther you reach, the more lies within your grasp.