Posted on 04/26/2017 9:51:56 AM PDT by Fitzy_888
Larry Page has his flying cars. Sergey Brin shall have an airship.
Brin, the Google co-founder, has secretly been building a massive airship inside of Hangar 2 at the NASA Ames Research Center, according to four people with knowledge of the project. It's unclear whether the craft, which looks like a zeppelin, is a hobby or something Brin hopes to turn into a business. "Sorry, I don't have anything to say about this topic right now," Brin wrote in an email.
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.
(...)
In a radio interview in 2013, Weston described plans for an airship that could be used to haul cargo. The idea is that airships could be more fuel-efficient than planes and could carry loads directly to where they're needed, rather than to transport centers like airports or shipping stations.
"New airship technologies have the promise to reduce the cost of moving things per ton-mile by up to an order of magnitude," Weston said in the interview. "It depends on the size of the airship. A larger airship can reduce costs a lot more than a smaller ship, but there’s design of a class of vehicles that can lift up to 500 tons that could be actually more fuel-efficient than even a truck."
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Really....a 250 foot tower, nowhere near any airport requires lighting blinking for aviation lighting.
Welcome the absurd brigade!
Weather, winds, misdirerect, pilot error, air controller error, aircraft malfunction, etc.
What planet are you on?
And since the tethered blimp has abundant power, doing the same is impossible??? Likewise for the tether cable...a string of LED lights at intervals should work the same as and as well as any tower lights.
"Welcome the absurd brigade!"
Methinks 'tis you who should join the absurd brigade.
Several tethered balloons are already in use near the Southern border, and can reach to 15,000 ft.
One near Deming, NM is shown here -
https://skyvector.com/?ll=32.037028964327384,-107.87979125531093&chart=301&zoom=2&fpl=undefined
Good information.....thanks!
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