The Airship Prize

It was 80 years ago this month that the LZ 129 Hindenburg exploded as it was attempting to dock at Lakehurst Naval Air Station in New Jersey.

Miraculously, 62 of the 97 passengers and crew survived. However, now there is only one remaining who escaped the disaster: 88-year-old Werner Doehner.

He was 8 years old on that fateful day, traveling home with his family from a vacation in Germany. His father and sister died in the crash. Werner, a brother and his mother escaped by jumping about 20 feet out a window of the airship.

This is a story about a 7-year-old boy who also saw the “air on fire.” He was watching from the attic of his house, six miles away.

It’s a memory that has stayed with Ed Frankman, 87, seared on his mind all these years later. I was talking on the phone with him on May 6, the anniversary of the tragedy.

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Russia’s experimental airship Atlant is scheduled to make its first flight somewhere in late-2020, NSN news service reported, citing Augur-RosAeroSystems CEO Gennady Verba.

Gennady Verba said that the final version of the Atlant airship would  take about 3.5 years to build at the cost of several billion rubles.

He added, however, that the other modifications would cost less.

© SPUTNIK/ ALEX AMINEV

Russia to Complete Construction of Airship ‘Atlant’ for Army by 2018

During a news conference at the National News Service headquarters on Tuesday, Verba thanked the Skolkovo Fund for helping develop the airship’s autonomous ballast system, which allows the airship to float freely in a horizontal position and, whenever necessary, to lose its lift and descend.

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JP Aerospace is an interesting company – in the city of Rancho Cordova, CA., California, JP Aerospace, America’s OTHER Space Program. Their aim is to develop ways to send airships up into the stratosphere – and more controversially, all the way to orbit with their “Orbital Airships” vision. The airships would accelerate very slowly, at a rate of perhaps a few centimeters per second increase n speed every second, over several days, until they reach orbital velocity. Can they, or can’t they, or how far can they go?

If you do it the other way, build airships to re-enter Earth’s atmosphere from orbit, then this is much more widely accepted to be possible, with many scientists exploring plans such as the VAMP proposal for atmospheric re-entry for Venus, Titan and Earth by an airship that inflates as it re-enters, and slows down because it presents such a large surface area to the atmosphere. Also there was a 1964 test of a small inflated paraglider that achieved hypersonic speeds of over Mach 3 at a height of 400,000 feet, though only for minutes. So hypersonic flight by airships seems to be feasible in principle at those heights, but how fast and for how long? It is also definitely possible to have an inflatable in orbit, from the Echo project, which used inflated balloons as satellites for communications purposes.

Here is John Powell outlining his idea

Throughout this article, page numbers refer to John Powell’s book “Floating to Space, the Airship to Orbit Program”.

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As the executives at most technology companies are preparing for the future of flying vehicles, Google co-founder Sergey Brin apparently is exploring modes of transportation from the past. Brin, according to unnamed Bloomberg sources close to him, is building a large airship inside Hangar 2 at the NASA Ames Research Center in Silicon Valley. While the vessel isn’t an official Alphabet project, it isn’t clear whether Brin is building it as a hobby or in the hopes of starting a business. “Sorry, I don’t have anything to say about this topic right now,” Brin told Bloomberg.

Ames, which once housed the USS Macon, is located near Alphabet’s headquarters in Mountain View, Calif. By visiting the facility and looking at archived photographs of the Macon, Brin reportedly became extremely interested in airships, and decided three years ago to build one of his own. Google took over the hangars at Ames in 2015, and one of them currently houses the metal framework for Brin’s ship. Alan Weston, who formerly was the director of programs at Ames, reportedly has been brought in to head the project.

Read more at: http://nesn.com/2017/04/google-co-founder-building-secret-airship-inside-former-nasa-hanger/

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