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."
(...)
A typical cell site has a theoretic range of 22 to 45 miles depending on the technology, but may be limited to just a couple miles depending on terrain.
Imagine a cell site at 5,000 foot elevation serving up to a 45 mile radius. The data might be trunked to the ground with a microwave dish or piped to a satellite. Parked over Manhatten it could serve 20 million people within the 45 mile radius...6% of the countries population. There are probably thundreds of cell sites within that radius that cost thundreds of thousands of dollars each, suddenly an airship looks like a very cheap alternative.
They could take it to the Olympics and the Super Bowl offering free internet access -with mandatory advertising.
They could take it to a national disaster like Katina. Imagine the good will that might buy for Google.
Imagine all those dead birds.
#### Google and good will :)
This piss on Easter every year and Christmas too.
Every other day they have an extreme leftist being feted on their page.
This guy escaped Jewish persecution only to put atheists and muslims on his front page.
Folks that hate Jews BTW.
They’ve had to escape Germany and the USSR. Where will they escape when they are getting slaughtered here if the left, ironically, wins this war for the future of America?
I’d like to see the google finders in that.
Why does one of the richest guys on the planet, a guy who could well afford his own facility, get to use a NASA hangar as his private gargage?
Now where have we heard of a “huge zeppelin” disaster before?
Except for such an application, you don't need a "huge" airship.
I love airships. Built it and user will come.
Weather is a rigid air-ship’s biggest enemy. For these to be successful at anything they have to be able to run and hide or go to ground when the wind starts to blow.
The Goodyear Blimp flies out of Akron, South of me. When it heads to Cleveland, it’s flightpath is right over my house. It is INCREDIBLY loud! It ROARS!
.......
That is the same idea that Burt Rutan worked on in 1998, but stationing his “cell phone tower” at 60,000 ft for better coverage.
The plane is still active.
Ive been paying attention to the effort to bring back airships for about 20 years now and it seems that enough time has passed since WWII propaganda efforts that airships have been getting some serious consideration and redesign by some big players for a whole host of applications.
Consider HULA (Darpa walrus) and all the changes just that could bring about if further adapted by the military and corporations. Smaller versions, bigger versions, special purpose manned and drone versions...
Walrus/HULA Heavy-Lift Blimps Rise, Fall… Rise?
Which leads to things like...
and
Lockheed Martin P-791
The P-791 was designed as part of the U.S. Army's Long Endurance Multi-intelligence Vehicle (LEMV) program, but lost the program's competition to Northrop Grumman's HAV-3 design. The P-791 was modified to be a civil cargo aircraft under the name SkyTug, with a lift capability of 20 short tons (18,000 kg) and plans to scale larger...In March 2016, Straightline Aviation signed a Letter of intent for 12 LMH1 airships, valued at $480 million...The LMH1 would initially transport 20 tonnes of cargo or 19 passengers, plus 2 crew members, with deliveries beginning in 2018...
and leads eventually to...
Hybrid Air Vehicles HAV 304 Airlander 10
There is far too much money in this area just laying around waiting to be collected by someone with his resources and connections.
They don’t say how big the one he’s actually building is.
Being near neutrally bouyant it doesn’t have to devote thrust to generate lift. To loiter it only needs to combat the prevailing wind.
If you wanted to loiter over a metropolitan area for weeks or fly intercontinental you’d need crew quarter for two or three shifts of pilots and technicians. You’d need a massive fuel capacity. The crew might serve like they do on an oil rig, three weeks at a time.
Otherwise, yes the space for radio equipment and powering it is a trivial concern.
If I were Sergey and had money to burn I’d consider this and know everywhere the airship went it would generate hoopla...and eat Verizon and AT&T’s lunch.
Well, given the size of the buildings involved, it appears to be quite large.
But if one were targeting cell phone tower replacement, it seems to me that a tethered blimp would make more sense than a piloted dirigible. No pilots needed, no massive fuel supply, power to run electronics possibly from solar cells, or simply run up the tether cable.
Tethered by a cable it becomes a WW2 barrage balloon with the cable cutting the wings off wayward civilian flights, something the Federal Aviation Administration night look down on.
Shouldn't be a problem, as airspace routes are already known, and the location of the tethered units will be known and not changing.
It is not a balloon, it is an airship, get out!
My Brother worked for Dick many years ago and he still gets excited when he speaks of those days
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