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Sergey Brin Is Reportedly Building 'Massive Airship' In NASA Research Center (bloomberg.com)
Google co-founder Sergey Brin is secretly building a "massive airship" inside of Hangar 2 at the NASA Ames Research Center, according to a report from Bloomberg. "It's unclear whether the craft, which looks like a zeppelin, is a hobby or something Brin hopes to turn into a business," reports Bloomberg. When asked about further details, Brin wrote in an email: "Sorry, I don't have anything to say about this topic right now." From the report: The people familiar with the project said Brin has long been fascinated by airships. His interest in the crafts started when Brin would visit Ames, which is located next to Google parent Alphabet Inc.'s headquarters in Mountain View, California. In the 1930s, Ames was home to the USS Macon, a huge airship built by the U.S. Navy. About three years ago, Brin decided to build one of his own after ogling old photos of the Macon. In 2015, Google unit Planetary Ventures took over the large hangars at Ames from NASA and turned them into laboratories for the company. Brin's airship, which isn't an Alphabet project, is already taking shape inside one. Engineers have constructed a metal skeleton of the craft, and it fills up much of the enormous hangar. Alan Weston, the former director of programs at NASA Ames, is leading Brin's airship project, according to the people, who asked not to be named discussing the secretive plans. Weston didn't respond to requests for comment.
I'd be interested to know how this might size up to the new British heavy-lift airship, Airlander 10: https://www.hybridairvehicles....
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I doubt this is intended to be a money making project. At most maybe an advertising expense/ tax deduction.
I'd rather see a guy spending his money on something like this, which employs a bunch of people and will be pretty cool when it gets off the ground, than on political manipulation like buying the Washington Post and turning it into a political blog or funding groups like Tea Party, MoveOn, or Occupy Wall Street.
On the other hand, Jeff Bezos is also funding Blue Origin, which is building rockets. I suppose if you have enough money, you can do all kinds of things.
My personal favorite of "I have so much money..." examples is Larry Ellison, who essentially bought the America's Cup by plowing so much money into winning, largely so that he could totally remake it into a high-speed, trimarans of death, competition circuit. Oh, and he bought a Hawaiian Island to be his personal fiefdom.
I personally find it very exciting. I knew that Alphabet had rented the Moffett Field hangars from NASA and were rennovating them. But their official stated purpose for doing so was to store a number of company planes. This is the exciting part:
So first off:
1) It's a rigid airship. Which used to be common but is now rare. Zeppelin NT is a semirigid, with a trilobate truss inside, but there's not many other examples. Rigids are favored when you're building something very large, as they reduce the stress on the skin.
2) It's huge. Hangar 2 is 52,1 meters high, 90,5 and 327,7m long.
I hope it's a lifting body! If I'm not mistaken it'd be the world's first rigid lifting body airship (correct me if I'm wrong!). Either way it's yet another sign that we're - at least temporarily - entering a new lighter-than-air renaissance. Who knows whether it will last, but it's great to see so many companies giving it another shot, making use of modern technology and design. Because there have been some huge improvements since the old Akron / Macon days. Also wonder about the fuel. Something like Blau gas, so it's buoyancy-neutral as it burns?
Of course, not everything in the article is exciting or new...
Um... yes, that's how lift cells work.... you either use them or you use ballonets, your choice... there's a couple other possibilities, like high overpressure superpressure balloons, or compressors + gas tanks, but the former doesn't scale, and the latter generally comes with too much mass and cost penalties with too poor responsiveness.
BTW, for those not familiar with the Macon and the Akron, I definitely recommend reading about them. They were literal flying aircraft carriers. You know how a landing jet on an aircraft carrier catches a cable with a hook? They did that too, but in the other direction - they caught a "trapeze" on their topside. They were then raised into the hangar, which was designed for five airplanes.
They unfortunately weren't long in service. Both of their losses could have been prevented with any combination of better weather prediction, computer controls, and better lift control. The Macon's loss was also stupid in that they were flying with unrepaired structural damage, out doing fleet maneuvers.
Very well; let this abomination unto the Lord begin!
It's easier to hate on?
I'm wondering what the "innovation" is. Because I'm sure that he's not doing this without some angle, something unusual that he's doing with this one vs. other airships. Some sort of wow factor.
Sergei, blow me away with something totally crazy. Like make its skin transparent, fill it with heliox and have people live inside the envelope farming, like an Earth prototype of a Venus colony ;)
But honestly, my expectations are that it's a generic freight carrier, and that the twist would be that it's a rigid lifting body. Maybe if we're really lucky, solar-powered too.
Very well; let this abomination unto the Lord begin!
This could be used to carry large ungainly freight, like lifting a factory-built house onto a mountainside.
A common usecase for large airships is remote mining operations. They need big, heavy pieces of equipment brought into places without roads. Currently, the first step is to build a road - which is expensive and environmentally destructive. An airship needs only a clearing - and the "skycrane" variants don't even need that.
Another advantage is that it's much easier to design them to carry "bulky" cargoes than airplanes. Again, especially "skycrane" designs where the cargo hangs beneath.
Very well; let this abomination unto the Lord begin!
I don't really see how this qualifies as a 'secretive' project.
It's due to the glands in the blimp skin.
[STR]
Airships are not party balloons; they don't "pop" when you make a hole in them. They have low overpressure and a huge volume to surface area, so a "bullethole" is just a slow leak; it's not even a reason to land. A helicopter is far more vulnerable to small arms fire than a helium airship.
As for what it buys over a helicopter, show me a helicopter that can move 50-500 tonnes payload at a per-kilogram rate cheaper than a freight truck while flying halfway around the world without refueling. Because that's what people are looking to build with this new generation of airships. Even Airlander 10, which is just a commercial prototype for the Airlander 50, carries more payload than the largest helicopter used by the US military, the Sikorsky CH-53E Super Stallion.
Very well; let this abomination unto the Lord begin!
Yes, but its first use would not be to move factory-built houses, but pieces of windmills.
A major limitation and expense on wind farms is the need to transport oversize blades to the sites, which requires some serious road building, considering that many of the best sites are in rugged terrain, and maneuvering a truck with a 36m payload means you need to build a route without any sharp turns. If the airship can also function as a sky crane, then erecting the windmill's mast and attaching the blades is a lot less expensive, too. Very likely the only roads that a wind farm would need would be the kind of dirt roads that would service the power lines.
Other low hanging fruit would include moving lightweight but bulky produce like lettuce from farm to market, a lower cost alternative to helicopter logging, installation and servicing of cell towers in remote sites, and use in regional emergencies such as floods (Katrina) or earthquakes.
We are 20 years overdue for a new airship industry. We had the technology to produce commercially viable airships before the turn of the century. It is long past time to see these air whales overhead.
They also built a freaking massive hangar, which is now a tropical theme park.
It's not just huge by building standards, it's huge even by hangar standards. By far the largest in the world.
Very well; let this abomination unto the Lord begin!