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Airship Inflated To Create Monster "Stratellite"
yoderman94 writes "A huge inflatable vehicle as long as a 23-floor skyscraper is tall has become the world's largest airship in its bid to serve as a stratospheric satellite, or 'stratellite,' according to its developers."
Is the pilot named Cid?
I am officially gone from
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Anyone else see the issue?
The Great Big Suppository in the Sky
L'esperienza de questa dolce vita (The experience of this sweet life) - Dante Alighieri, The Divine Comedy
Tokyo is so screwed!
Here I was thinking it wasn't a real airship yet because it sounds like they have only filled the balloon, but not attached anything to the balloon yet.
At this point its just a balloon. It still needs its skin, engines, a compartment for pilot and or crew.
They have the air part down, now they just need the ship part.
Don't know something? Look it up. Still don't know? Then ask.
(235 feet) / (100 yards) = 0.783
Not even one.
This may be the largest current airship, but the airships of the past absolutely dwarfed this. The Hindenburg was 245m (803 ft 10 in), or 2.67 football fields.
"linux is just DOS with a UNIX like syntax" -- Galactic Dominator (944134)
Would that be American or European football fields?
What I want to know is if we're going to waste expensive helium on this or inflate it with hydrogen?
Weather balloons, hobbyist stratospheric balloons, etc, are usually filled with helium. But the only rationale for using helium is that it doesn't burn. It's more expensive than hydrogen. It's less efficient than hydrogen, and we only have so much helium left. We're not sending up people. There is no reason to use helium, really.
It's time to get rid of the Hindenburg meme.
--
BMO
"and we only have so much helium left"
That's the bad news. The good news is actually two-sided. For one...
For helium-3's true believers - the ones who think the isotope's fusion power will take us to the edge of our solar system and beyond - talk of the coming shortage is overblown: There's a huge, untapped supply right in our own backyard.
"The moon is the El Dorado of helium-3," says Savage, and he's right: Every star, including our sun, emits helium constantly. Implanted in the lunar soil by the solar wind, the all-important gas can be found on the moon by the bucketful."
So all of the helium we could need is on the moon, and if we can reach them, the gas giant planets. So the second part of the good news is that this gives us a real, economically viable reason to go back to the moon and stay this time... to actually build a base and commence helium mining and collection. And there's other resources on the moon waiting for us as well.
Life is hard, and the world is cruel
It's also merely the largest modern airship. The Graf Zeppelin was three times longer, and most of the interwar airships were similarly large.
"They redundantly repeated themselves over and over again incessantly without end ad infinitum" -- ibid.