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New Details On Sergey Brin's Plan For The World's Largest Aircraft (theguardian.com)
An anonymous reader shares The Guardian's report on plans for a new aircraft that's two-and-a-half times the size of a 747.
Google co-founder Sergey Brin is building a hi-tech airship in Silicon Valley destined to be the largest aircraft in the world, according to multiple sources with knowledge of the project. "It's going to be massive on a grand scale," said one, adding that the airship is likely to be nearly 200 meters [656 feet] long... Brin wants the gargantuan airship, funded personally by the billionaire, to be able to deliver supplies and food on humanitarian missions to remote locations. However, it will also serve as a luxurious intercontinental "air yacht" for Brin's friends and family.
One source put the project's price tag at $100m to $150m. Igor Pasternak, an airship designer who was involved in the early stages of the project, believes airships could be as revolutionary for the trillion-dollar global cargo market as the internet was for communications. "Sergey is pretty innovative and forward looking," he said. "Trucks are only as good as your roads, trains can only go where you have rails, and planes need airports. Airships can deliver from point A to point Z without stopping anywhere in between."
The Guardian quips that while Brin's plans may stay secret for a while, "the good news is that the first flight test of such an enormous aircraft will be impossible to hide."
One source put the project's price tag at $100m to $150m. Igor Pasternak, an airship designer who was involved in the early stages of the project, believes airships could be as revolutionary for the trillion-dollar global cargo market as the internet was for communications. "Sergey is pretty innovative and forward looking," he said. "Trucks are only as good as your roads, trains can only go where you have rails, and planes need airports. Airships can deliver from point A to point Z without stopping anywhere in between."
The Guardian quips that while Brin's plans may stay secret for a while, "the good news is that the first flight test of such an enormous aircraft will be impossible to hide."
That thing is tremendous!
Airships can deliver from point A to point Z without stopping anywhere in between.
Except when there's a storm in A or Z.
Helium is scarce and wasting more of it on a billionaire's hobby won't help future generations who will need it more.
No one ever thought of this before! Airships! Amazing! /s
That's the Robles when you don't take liberal arts subjects like English and history.
You don't learn the meaning of "innovative" and you don't know about things that have done before and you rehash old ideas thinking they are new.
And the Silly Valley sycophants call you an innovative genius - and appear as ignorant buffoons to the rest of the World.
The Spruce Goose of our time, or the Hindenburg of our time? Cannot decide.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Given that many areas in need of aid are in the midst of civil wars or dealing with insurgents, what happens when an RPG or related is fired at one of these ships?
Is he trying to get rid of his friends?
There is a reason the Zeppelins faded from use. Actually, quite a few. Probably the biggest is that they are slow and highly vulnerable to winds. The world record airship speed is ~71 mph. Fair weather winds lots of places routinely gust up to 20-30 mph, and storm winds lots of places exceed 70. Should your airship ever need to drive into a headwind you could go faster in a car. Handling or landing in high winds (and high means about anything over 15kts) is a real problem. Sure it can land "anywhere" as long as anywhere is not windy, and as long as you don't need to get there very fast. No amount of Google genius is going to fix that.
I doubt that it will go anywhere. There are numerous big problems with the concept. Helium is scarce and costly to collect in nature - and there is not enough for a global transportation system. Airships are susceptible to storms, rains and other weather issues - much more so than ships and trucks. Hydrogen is better as a lifting gas and can easily be produced from water - but it is hugely dangerous. Having a 200m sized target filled with an explosive substance flying close to the ground is every terrorists fantasy. Stuff like this tends to happen if some people just have more money than they know what to do with ...
Lol, this is similar to what Howard Hughes did, pouring tons of money into building a giant-ass albatross of a plane that no one wanted or could afford. Hughes' monster plane was the the Spruce Goose, which flew precisely once before being retired.
Just cruising through this digital world at 33 1/3 rpm...
The inside word is that it's going to be named the USS Invincible aka "the unpoppable airship". With a name like that, you know nothing could possibly go wrong! ;)
Anons need not reply. Questions end with a question mark.
Is there some additive that could make hydrogen safe? That would be a good research topic. This is a nice energy-lean, infrastructure-lean method to transport materials.
They will have nuclear zeppelins, nuclear airplanes, etc.
Like the nuclear submarines but heavier.
Problem is that it will be filled with HELIUM, which is an IRREPLACEABLE RARE ELEMENT that is used in SCIENCE RESEARCH that advances humanity and helps get us off this rock.
Not only will it be FILLED with helium, ALL balloons LEAK like a SIEVE, so out into the atmosphere and from there into space the helium goes in massive quantities, never to be seen again.
That's fucking stupid.
If they want to do something, they should do the RESEARCH on Hydrogen fill such that any risk of fire is minimized, including various forms of "ejection seat / cabin" style apparatus.
At least you can make hydrogen with water and solar panels.
Interesting. So is he just gonna leave anyway?
Perhaps fleeing from your dramatic writings of a madman?
Once he reaches space, it comes back down to the planet core. Everyone knows this.
ALL balloons LEAK like a SIEVE, so out into the atmosphere and from there into space the helium goes
Pretty sure Sergey is also building a helium recapture net to cover the upper atmosphere with so that should be fine.
If they want to do something, they should do the RESEARCH on Hydrogen fill such that any risk of fire is minimized, including various forms of "ejection seat / cabin" style apparatus.
"Ladies and gentlemen, we should be arriving at our destination shortly. The captain has prepared the charges and the cabin should begin our patented Super Rapid Ground Approach shortly, please take to your seats and fasten all seventeen points of your harness. Our cabin crew decided not to get on in the first place so talk amongst yourselves if you have trouble with the straps."
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Those sorry Google people are using US Government owned Moffitt Field in Mountain View CA as their own personal playground.
We have quite a population of Burrowing Owls, an endangered species, on that facility.
Sergei Brin could care less that his personal 767 is disturbing those owls every time he makes a takeoff or landing at that facility. Not to mention how many owls the engines in that aircraft have chewed into coyote fodder.
Irritates the crap out of me that Google is probably building this "balloon" in MY hangar at Moffitt.
Caution: Contents under pressure
Lots and lots of helium available as a by product of lots and lots of natural gas.
It will, however, cost more than just pumping it out of helium wells that have a relatively high concentration of the gas.
Not to worry,
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
Do they mean the development cost or the unit cost? The A380 cost 15 Billion euros to develop, and has a unit cost of $440 million to buy.
Up to 350 million dollars.
The largest one was British R101 that measured 223m . The cost of the program is comparable to the Brin's, so not much changed since 1929.
The idea of rejuvenating the airship business isn't exactly new. In 1996 company Cargolifter (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CargoLifter) was founded with exactly the same idea: built large airships for cargo delivery, preferably to remote locations with no other means of transportation. It didn't work out. Lack of interest and orders forced Cargolifter to go into banktruptcy in 2002. Only their humungous hangar survived and is now refurbished as tourist attraction (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tropical_Islands_Resort).
Maybe our favorite internet billionaire has more luck, but I doubt it.
While I think his intent to use the craft for disaster and emergency situations is laudable his plan of a single huge airship is ill conceived at best, idiotic at worst.
A single ship is a single point of failure, anything goes wrong with it, a mechanical failure in an engine, an issue with it's control systems, bad weather at it's launch site and it is grounded. Plus you have the "time to site" to consider, to wit: An Earthquake in central India, how long will it take the airship to get there from California? Airships are not all that fast.
A better plan would be a fleet of smaller airships stationed at bases around the world. Redundancy in numbers. When a disaster happens they all load up and move out. The ships from closer bases get there first and can start helping while the ships from farther out are in transit, and the ships in transit can be redirected to depending on local need. Something you would not be able to do with a single ship.
Unless the idea isn't really to help others, but more about getting into the record books for having the biggest something in the world.
... it wants its idea back.
This sounds like one of the U.S. Navy challenges from the 1990's, with similar requirements to the "100 knot Navy".
IIRC, one requirement was:
Deliver 250,000 tonnes anywhere in the world in 7 days, and a total of one million tonnes in 28 days.
USB, USB, USB!
Just wait for Sergey Brin to enter into the shoe design and production world!
It's big enough that there's room for a transgender bathroom.
Set in a future where a failed climate-change experiment kills all life on the planet except for a lucky few who boarded the Airpiercer, a plane that travels around the globe, where a class system emerges.
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt17...
I welcome serving my Google overlords...
SD
âoeWho knew something as harmless as willful ignorance could end up having real consequences?â
Could you use it as a mobile base for delivering small packages via drone to destinations as you slowly pass over?
So at which point does Sergey start peeing in bottles?
You just don't fucking get it do you... He is a NON renewable resource, once you piss it away to the sky, you CANNOT trap or recycle it and it doesn't fall back, it's GONE, for good, just like OIL GAS URANIUM COAL etc.... burn it up and its fucked away, GONE... on the timescale of MILLIONS of years.
FUCK your grandkids and their party balloons... keep that shit for research, fusion reactors, interstellar drives, whatever the fuck could migrate us into the stars.
Dress your old grey fatass up in a silly costume and dance a fricken jig for them instead.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atmospheric_escape
Park one over every major city and have drones deliver to and from the air ship. Factorio ftw
Why is Brin doing this? Could it somehow be connected to Larry Page's flying cars business? Maybe a giant airshop could work as a carrier for flying cars or delivery drones? I don't see the business case yet but someone might have an idea?
Good!
Why not a hydrogen/helium mixture? Everyone seems to be treating this as either/or proposition when it doesn't need to be. For example, helium is a neutral gas, so wouldn't it serve to reduce the flammability of hydrogen?
One immediate problem I can think of would be separation of the gases in to layers, meaning an inconsistent mix. If that's a problem - and I'm not sure that it is - it could be tackled by limiting the height of the gas cells: just make them thinner and flatter. A simple fan could also keep the gas moving if necessary to prevent stratification.
I found an old posting that seems to indicate that you could only have up to 8.7% hydrogen for the mixture to be safe, and that's not enough to make a difference (since the lifting power of hydrogen isn't that much better than helium's. A mix with more hydrogen might then be better classed as "less flammable", rather than setting up an expectation that the gas be totally non-flammable. If some helium can "tame" hydrogen a bit, I think that would be worth pursuing.
(this is not a
I brake for hurricanes.
I brake for tornadoes.
Or maybe they should be:
I break for hurricanes.
I break for tornadoes.
There's no time like the present. Well, the past used to be.
"Those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it."
- Santayana
Sounds like we have a new Howard Hughes. All he needs to be is crazy as well and become a recluse.
But squandering helium on party balloons is OK? Because those use way more than blimps ever will.