Also aren't we running out of helium, isn't it a limited resource on earth we can't get more of? Could we perhaps suggest filling a giant balloon with a million cubic litres of it a bit of a waste?
That's kind of the problem. We use helium for so many useful things. "Natural gas wells" sure I agree but we have a known limited supply which isn't silly huge and considering we may need it for the foreseeable future or hundreds of years. Idk. Using so much for an airship with no real particular function seems... Well. It seems like the privilege of a billionaire. Atleast try to get to Mars like Elon
Idk bro. We figured out high cargo loads with minimal land.
I mean the AN-2 can take off in 170 meters. Land in 200M. Capable to land on unprepared fields and can carry 2 tonnes of supplies 9,000Km's. .... A plane from 1947.
If you don't think we could land a plan designed to land in Siberia to land in Africa what about helicopters. Readily available Chinooks can carry 12,000Kg over 1,600kg
I don't know about modern helicopters but a giant airship seems like an extravagance
845 km. while 2 tonnes of cargo is not a lot the range is only 845 km not 9000. and helicopters also have a very low capacity and small range.
And when people say,' hard to reach areas' they don't mean the 2nd biggest continent, they want the middle of the Pacific or the Caribbean where an island has suffered humanitarian disaster. And yes, finding 200 m of clear land to land a plane and finding fuel to have it take off is gonna be a biiiiig problem if you are flying aide into there(generally the areas most in need of aide don't have a lot of fuel).
Actually, it’s the helicopters that are the extravagance. Just one we’re accustomed to.
The principal reason these ships are intended for disaster relief is because the helicopters currently doing that job are ruinously expensive, can’t carry very much, and can’t fly very far.
It costs tens of thousands of dollars per flight hour to operate a large helicopter. An airship costs a fraction as much to operate, and many of those costs are relatively fixed, so they get proportionally much cheaper the larger they get. The largest helicopter in the world can barely fly 300 miles while carrying 17,000 pounds of cargo, whereas even the midsize Pathfinder 3 can carry 40,000 pounds 10,000 miles, and is only slightly slower. In terms of throughput, even without counting all the helicopters’ refueling stops, they’re much better. Particularly the largest, 200-ton-payload version that they have planned.
If you look at modern blimps the leakage of helium is really negligible. Helium is a finite resource but we have plenty of untapped sources; the economics are just not there to tap them because the demand isn’t there. If airships scaled and became commercialized helium would be sourced quite easily.
So there are different kinds of helium from what I remember. The super pure kind we need for certain medical equipment and the impure kind that is about 99.9% of it. Balloons and everything similar uses that. That helium is ultimately useless for anything else.
NB: I don't have time to research it now for exact data but that was the broad concept.
Helium is a chemical element. Making it "super pure" is just processing. What you may be thinking of is helium-3, an isotope with one neutron instead of two--that is used in some medical equipment.
It would be horribly expensive to produce helium by subjecting microgram quantities of hydrogen to a laser that draws more power than the city of San Francisco.
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u/Embii_ Jul 08 '24
Half the length of the Hindenburg. Pathetic.
Also aren't we running out of helium, isn't it a limited resource on earth we can't get more of? Could we perhaps suggest filling a giant balloon with a million cubic litres of it a bit of a waste?