Airships Rise Again (2021)(smithsonianmag.com)
smithsonianmag.com
Airships Rise Again (2021)
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/air-space-magazine/airships-rise-again-180979343/
83 comments
How would you mitigate the safety concerns of hydrogen gas?
Maybe surround the balloon with another balloon and fill the thin space between with an inert gas or helium? I guess you put some kind of gas sensor inside the baloon that would alert you to any oxygen getting in, but that would necessitate having electricity near the hydrogen, which is probably a no-no.
Maybe surround the balloon with another balloon and fill the thin space between with an inert gas or helium? I guess you put some kind of gas sensor inside the baloon that would alert you to any oxygen getting in, but that would necessitate having electricity near the hydrogen, which is probably a no-no.
Sensor could be optical. Gas sensor using fiber to carry the signal. But probably this is almost paranoia, electrical sensors would trip much earlier than a critical concentration would form. Also possible to design a very well encapsulated electrical sensor.
This is really interesting, I hadn't thought of it like that. It looks like airships are one of those things that work much better as you scale them up.
Isn't helium extremely expensive and even getting more so every year?
Not really.
Helium is extracted from natural gas fields. It is continuously produced inside Earth by the decay of Radon; the alpha particles from the decay become helium once they acquire 2 electrons. Since helium is light, it keeps seeping upwards. Geological formations that trap natural gas will also trap helium.
Some fields have a lot of helium. There's one in the US that has 7% of it, but that's an extreme case. There are plenty in Kansas, Oklahoma and Texas with around 1-2% helium.
According to the US Geological Survey [1] the average price for private consumers for crude helium was less than $5 per cubic meter. The total reserves were a bit more than 20 billion m3, split into various levels of confidence (measured, probable, possible, speculative). You can read that to mean that essentially the reserves of helium are infinite.
Why? Oil and natural gas companies are all about reserves. Their reserves are the assets against which they raise debt, there's an entire finance area about oil and gas exploration and production. The best reserves are those that are producing right now. Below that are those other levels of reserves. The more certain a reserve is, the more money you can raise against it to finance your activities. But elevating a reserve from "speculative" to "possible" or "probable" is costly, and risky. Companies do that based on a long term plan.
But they do it. Journalists like to take the current level of reserves, divide by the current usage, and voila, the world has only x years of resource y left. Where generally x is a fairly small number, like 10. But years pass, and that x does not dwindle to zero. People think that somehow there were some new and unexpected discoveries, but otherwise, we'll still run out of the resource in a few years.
But it's not like that. The reserves get renewed as part of the normal business. Not "renewed" as in "renewable", but just as in elevating some reserves from possible to probable, some from speculative to possible, and finally expanding the speculative reserves too.
Anyway, even at the level of a few billion cubic meters of helium, we'd still have enough helium for a few thousand of these ginormous airships.
[1] https://pubs.usgs.gov/periodicals/mcs2020/mcs2020-helium.pdf
Helium is extracted from natural gas fields. It is continuously produced inside Earth by the decay of Radon; the alpha particles from the decay become helium once they acquire 2 electrons. Since helium is light, it keeps seeping upwards. Geological formations that trap natural gas will also trap helium.
Some fields have a lot of helium. There's one in the US that has 7% of it, but that's an extreme case. There are plenty in Kansas, Oklahoma and Texas with around 1-2% helium.
According to the US Geological Survey [1] the average price for private consumers for crude helium was less than $5 per cubic meter. The total reserves were a bit more than 20 billion m3, split into various levels of confidence (measured, probable, possible, speculative). You can read that to mean that essentially the reserves of helium are infinite.
Why? Oil and natural gas companies are all about reserves. Their reserves are the assets against which they raise debt, there's an entire finance area about oil and gas exploration and production. The best reserves are those that are producing right now. Below that are those other levels of reserves. The more certain a reserve is, the more money you can raise against it to finance your activities. But elevating a reserve from "speculative" to "possible" or "probable" is costly, and risky. Companies do that based on a long term plan.
But they do it. Journalists like to take the current level of reserves, divide by the current usage, and voila, the world has only x years of resource y left. Where generally x is a fairly small number, like 10. But years pass, and that x does not dwindle to zero. People think that somehow there were some new and unexpected discoveries, but otherwise, we'll still run out of the resource in a few years.
But it's not like that. The reserves get renewed as part of the normal business. Not "renewed" as in "renewable", but just as in elevating some reserves from possible to probable, some from speculative to possible, and finally expanding the speculative reserves too.
Anyway, even at the level of a few billion cubic meters of helium, we'd still have enough helium for a few thousand of these ginormous airships.
[1] https://pubs.usgs.gov/periodicals/mcs2020/mcs2020-helium.pdf
Yes that's true. On the other hand, much of the helium we currently extract along with natural gas is currently being wasted and vented into the atmosphere. It could be captured but that would require some investment in additional equipment.
Yeah, but hydrogen is cheap.
The math isnt that simple. As they get bigger the structure needed for very heavy lifts also multiplies. The old airships only carried light/small objects like people and mail. Lifting large individual objects is a totally differnt game. Ok, the new beast has a 3000kg capacity, but the crane/truss necessary to suspend a 3000kg object will itself weigh perhaps 1000kg. You then need a ballast system, separate from the crane, that also can hold 3000kg (big water bags or equivalent) to hold the airship down when it isn't loaded. That also requires more structure and equipment. The cargo-carrying behemoth that can quietly lift giant refinery parts into place is not a simple equation.
It's not that bad. Without reaching for any modern supermaterials, ordinary Victorian-age 2GPa music wire needs to be 4.4 millimeters thick to support 3000kg; 1000 kg of 4.4-millimeter music wire would be 8.3 kilometers of wire. 100 meters of it only weighs 12 kg. (Of course this doesn't include the safety factor you'd want.)
Tension members like wire scale linearly with load; a cable of 2 GPa music wire that can support 3000 tonnes would be only 140 mm in diameter. 100 meters of it would weigh 12 tonnes. This almost doesn't change if you split it into separate cables going to separate parts of the airship envelope.
It's not the Victorian age anymore, and we actually do have modern supermaterials like flash bainite, S-glass, Tyranno fiber, basalt fiber, carbon fiber, kevlar, and gelspun UHWMPE. Basalt fiber, declassified in 01995, is 2½ times as strong as music wire and one third the weight, so roughly you need 1.6 tonnes of it (1600 kg) to support 3'000'000 kg at a 100-meter span. It's not all that expensive either; it's mostly used to reinforce concrete.
Of course you need more than just a single cable, and you need a safety factor. But the available margin is much greater than you're implying. Airships don't need big trusses to carry compressive loads because the compressive load is carried by the gas, and they have to carry the load below the envelope anyway to be stable, so the load is necessarily connected to the envelope with tensile members.
I don't mean to say that it's a simple project, in particular because the failure mode is so exciting, but it definitely seems feasible.
I don't think England, Sweden, or the US is going to do it, though. They can't even fly to the moon any more, they're embroiled in partisan fighting among their ethnicities that threatens to boil over into genocide, and California's been trying to build the US's first high-speed railway for 26 years without any success. They aren't the kind of place anymore where Enrico Fermi built the humans' first nuclear reactor under the football bleachers; when Richard Handl tried to build one in Sweden in 02011 the police detained him and confiscated his supplies, due to the irrational paranoia of the public. They aren't even the kind of place my friend Aaron built RECAP anymore.
Tension members like wire scale linearly with load; a cable of 2 GPa music wire that can support 3000 tonnes would be only 140 mm in diameter. 100 meters of it would weigh 12 tonnes. This almost doesn't change if you split it into separate cables going to separate parts of the airship envelope.
It's not the Victorian age anymore, and we actually do have modern supermaterials like flash bainite, S-glass, Tyranno fiber, basalt fiber, carbon fiber, kevlar, and gelspun UHWMPE. Basalt fiber, declassified in 01995, is 2½ times as strong as music wire and one third the weight, so roughly you need 1.6 tonnes of it (1600 kg) to support 3'000'000 kg at a 100-meter span. It's not all that expensive either; it's mostly used to reinforce concrete.
Of course you need more than just a single cable, and you need a safety factor. But the available margin is much greater than you're implying. Airships don't need big trusses to carry compressive loads because the compressive load is carried by the gas, and they have to carry the load below the envelope anyway to be stable, so the load is necessarily connected to the envelope with tensile members.
I don't mean to say that it's a simple project, in particular because the failure mode is so exciting, but it definitely seems feasible.
I don't think England, Sweden, or the US is going to do it, though. They can't even fly to the moon any more, they're embroiled in partisan fighting among their ethnicities that threatens to boil over into genocide, and California's been trying to build the US's first high-speed railway for 26 years without any success. They aren't the kind of place anymore where Enrico Fermi built the humans' first nuclear reactor under the football bleachers; when Richard Handl tried to build one in Sweden in 02011 the police detained him and confiscated his supplies, due to the irrational paranoia of the public. They aren't even the kind of place my friend Aaron built RECAP anymore.
Thanks for this. This is the first reference I've seen to the soviet pi=3 thing. What's the origin of that?
Perhaps it comes from the Soviets' notorious ineptitude for mathematics and aeronautics.
Which is surprising to me. Coming from a physics and mathematics background, a significant portion of my lecturers (and generally the better ones) at university came from ex-USSR countries.
...although maybe all that tells us is that the best ones left.
...although maybe all that tells us is that the best ones left.
Presumably the throwaway troll is trolling, sarcastically, not attempting to describe reality literally.
Meanwhile, cargo ships are out there carrying hundreds of thousands of tons. I don't want to be a naysayer, but ships will always have the luxury of the fact that water is denser than air. You can float a hell of a lot more on it. Plus, we have hundreds of years of infrastructure built to support it.
I'm having a hard time thinking of what the place of these air ships will be. I realize that large cargo ships can't go everywhere, but again, we already have things like rail that far outclass what these airships are claiming.
I'm having a hard time thinking of what the place of these air ships will be. I realize that large cargo ships can't go everywhere, but again, we already have things like rail that far outclass what these airships are claiming.
OP article makes a compelling argument that there's an untapped market for faster-than-shipping and cheaper-than-air freight:
> The new airships can carry heavier loads farther and cheaper than helicopters can, with lower emissions than fixed-wing aircraft—potentially zero emissions, if the ships are powered by hydrogen fuel cells.
> To Buerge the aerospace engineer, helicopters seem like a reasonable analogy to the new airships. “I don’t ride on a helicopter with any regularity, and you probably don’t either,” he says. But even though the civilian helicopter market isn’t near the size of the commercial aircraft industry, “I wouldn’t call helicopters an unsuccessful technology, or a technology that doesn’t exist in a serious way.”
> The new airships can carry heavier loads farther and cheaper than helicopters can, with lower emissions than fixed-wing aircraft—potentially zero emissions, if the ships are powered by hydrogen fuel cells.
> To Buerge the aerospace engineer, helicopters seem like a reasonable analogy to the new airships. “I don’t ride on a helicopter with any regularity, and you probably don’t either,” he says. But even though the civilian helicopter market isn’t near the size of the commercial aircraft industry, “I wouldn’t call helicopters an unsuccessful technology, or a technology that doesn’t exist in a serious way.”
Airships make the entire Earth a shipping port on the air ocean. Rail shipping doesn't come close to ships in cost, even in the few places to which it has been so expensively extended. Airships might.
The only real potential commercial use case for cargo airships is delivery to remote locations which lack any other transportation infrastructure. Think of building a new wind farm and electrical lines out in the middle of nowhere.
I can envision intermodal commercial use cases. Airships could lift a group of containers from a ship, while at sea, and deliver them to inland marshaling yards. That would skip port bottlenecks as well as truck/train transport from, for example, Los Angeles to Chicago. The improved economics of unloading containers as a group, instead of one by one alone might make it worthwhile.
Doubt it. A huge airship would be needed to lift multiple shipping containers. It would be cheaper to expand the ports and lay more rail lines.
Wouldn't you want some sort of access for electrical lines anyways? Maybe for components air lifts would make sense. Building those with just airlift capacity seems rather messy and complicated. Getting people parts tools, possibly machinery at each pylon...
Still, I could see parts of wind turbines moved. As they are large and unwieldly, but not that heavy.
Still, I could see parts of wind turbines moved. As they are large and unwieldly, but not that heavy.
Are you making the assumption that the structure, engines, fuel, and cargo hold are a negligible proportion of the cargo mass? Payload actually looks like around 20% of gross weight.
I've been seeing some variant of this article for as long as I remember. The return of the airship feels like aviation's fusion at this point.
I've observed this for the last 75 years (I used to buy garage sale collections of old Popular Science/Popular Mechanics magazines as a kid 50 years ago). There seems to be some fascinating men have for dirigibles, just like they love planes, trains, and automobiles.
Correct title should be "Airships Rise Again, Again".
Correct title should be "Airships Rise Again, Again".
That was my first thought.
Every 10 years we seem to forget how little weight these things can actually carry and start dreaming again of cruise ships in the sky.
Every 10 years we seem to forget how little weight these things can actually carry and start dreaming again of cruise ships in the sky.
They have a romantic element to be sure. I think that's what keeps pulling entrepreneurial talent and private equity into these projects.
There's an old essay I can no longer find showing that airships are way too costly for their speed and payload capacities. There's a curve and they are simply way off it.
About the only use case that makes sense is picking up a moderately heavy payload in a remote location that severely lacks infrastructure, assuming you can (1) wait several days and (2) the weather is nice and predictable. Very niche.
There's an old essay I can no longer find showing that airships are way too costly for their speed and payload capacities. There's a curve and they are simply way off it.
About the only use case that makes sense is picking up a moderately heavy payload in a remote location that severely lacks infrastructure, assuming you can (1) wait several days and (2) the weather is nice and predictable. Very niche.
I'm not sure the economic term, but one of the economic problems with airships vs winged aircraft is their slowness. Let's say they take five times as long to arrive at their destination. In a simplified model, this means a winged aircraft can make five times the trips. That's five times the utility, and five times the ability to recoup your initial investment. I saw this argument made for how SpaceX's StarShip could start to become cost competitive with regular air travel. StarShip could travel halfway around the world in a fraction of the time that a regular jet takes. In theory it could complete multiple trips in the same time as a jet, allowing you to spread the initial purchase price of the craft across more flights.
Airships would seem to excel, then, for short trips where you need lots of lift. Within the same city, for example.
Airplanes, helicopters ... they seem to fight gravity, somehow not meant to fly, but succeeding nonetheless by overwhelming gravity almost violently with sheer horsepower.
Hot air balloons, gliders, airships seem much more casual. Not so much fighting with gravity as making a kind of gentleman's agreement with it.
I think that's why we might romanticize them. It is certainly a big reason I do.
Hot air balloons, gliders, airships seem much more casual. Not so much fighting with gravity as making a kind of gentleman's agreement with it.
I think that's why we might romanticize them. It is certainly a big reason I do.
I don't know enough about the economics of freight shipping to have an opinion on whether airships make economic sense for that. But for passenger travel, I can imagine a high-end market for the wealthy. Don't think "cruise ships" — think "yachts."
Wealthy people don't want a "yacht" that can only fly in good weather. It's hard to see how this could ever compete with private jets. Maybe in a few tourist areas it could work for sightseeing tours as an alternative to helicopters?
Unlike fusion, we know we can build airships, in fact, we already did. It is just that economically, it doesn't work. And even less so if you are using a scarce resource like helium as a lifting gas.
In a sense, it is even worse. At least, fusion is a hard engineering and physics problem with many unknowns, we know we can make progress, and we do, slowly. Airships are well understood, the physics has been known since Archimedes (ok, with a little bit of fluid dynamics), and on the engineering side of things, we already know how to make every single part, we might get some improvement: lighter envelopes, more efficient engines, etc... but no amount of engineering will change the fact that we will need a huge bag of gas to lift a comparatively small payload, slowly.
In a sense, it is even worse. At least, fusion is a hard engineering and physics problem with many unknowns, we know we can make progress, and we do, slowly. Airships are well understood, the physics has been known since Archimedes (ok, with a little bit of fluid dynamics), and on the engineering side of things, we already know how to make every single part, we might get some improvement: lighter envelopes, more efficient engines, etc... but no amount of engineering will change the fact that we will need a huge bag of gas to lift a comparatively small payload, slowly.
There’s a contract for 25 of them to go into service in Europe within a decade I think.
It’s gonna have to duke it out with the flying car for the title of aviations fusion…
Always will i upvote airships.
I love the solar power potential! And dynamic aerodynamics. And come on, safe hydrogen harvested from the ocean, why not?
I love the solar power potential! And dynamic aerodynamics. And come on, safe hydrogen harvested from the ocean, why not?
I wonder if it isn't possible to add a de-humidifier so it can remove water from air, elctrolyse it to and use to hydrogen to re-fill itself. Eternal balloons!
With the huge power density of solar panels on its massive upper surface, why not?
Just adding a huge amount of solar panels has other problems like massive thermal problems that would result in an expation of the helium inside. Source: I live in Friedrichsafen, the brithplace of the Zeppelin. Artur Brauchle Head of Electrics and Avionics at Zeppelin once told me this.
Sure, but did you have a credible source? Seriously, those must have been some unforgettable conversations. I'm a little envious.
So use the heat to turn water to steam. Steam-powered airships sound much cooler anyway.
Yeah, problems that definitely need to be solved!
Also, I almost went on a zeppelin this year, I didn’t know it was possible to still book them in your town!
Also, I almost went on a zeppelin this year, I didn’t know it was possible to still book them in your town!
This was initially a good laugh: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24739220 . Since one cannot reply to that post anymore, turning the monitor off is not a feature of a text editor; although font color is a feature the length or presence of entered text is visible by the cursor position & neither options disable editing (append only?). Using a command similar to this on a POSIX terminal is an option to hide the input & seem to disable backspace & delete:
echo "Thoughts?"; read -d $'\04' -s x; echo "$x"Happy to amuse!
The actual request is a little more subtle:
I think just a letter or two... Anything more and I'd want to edit. Anything less and I'd worry about whether it was working. But, I will try it with my screen off
I think just a letter or two... Anything more and I'd want to edit. Anything less and I'd worry about whether it was working. But, I will try it with my screen off
[deleted]
[deleted]
Dreams of cargo lifting airships gave us https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tropical_Islands_Resort
I really wish airships were actually viable, but it’s just never going to happen.
They seemed like a really nice way to travel, slow and sedate like an ocean liner, but you could take them over land.
They seemed like a really nice way to travel, slow and sedate like an ocean liner, but you could take them over land.
You can book a ride right now if you want. It may never be a dominant mode of transportation, but it is happening:
https://incredible-adventures.com/zeppelin-airship.html
https://incredible-adventures.com/zeppelin-airship.html
Across the top: “This adventure is not currently available.”
Use the official site instead: https://zeppelinflug.de/en/zeppelin-flights/scenic-flights-f...
As with LTA, he’s pushing the humanitarian applications of airships, having entered into a partnership with the World Food Program that he hopes will eventually see his invention delivering food to famine-struck regions.
I would love to see airships return, and there are many possibilities today that didn't exist in the late 19th and early 20th century. However, like supersonic flight for the masses, it doesn't seem likely to ever return to the aviation mainstream.
So straightforward. Trade off speed for volume. Weight carrying capacity is terrible, but—-high ceilings, huge windows, low altitude (better view), minimal sound… that is a real luxury experience!
The world’s most profitable route should be LA to Vegas.
It’s that glass bottom ballroom, you know?
But really, flying europe would be amazing. Next time I’m at the Bodensee in Germany, i really want to fly a zeppelin!
The world’s most profitable route should be LA to Vegas.
It’s that glass bottom ballroom, you know?
But really, flying europe would be amazing. Next time I’m at the Bodensee in Germany, i really want to fly a zeppelin!
Turbulence doesn't make for a "luxury" experience. Airships can't fly above the weather while carrying a useful load.
Given the software advances in drone stabilization, would it not be possible to add some sort of dynamic stabilization to this hypothetical airship?
The rotor systems typically used by small drones don't scale up well for use on larger manned airships. The weight and drag penalty would be huge, and the higher inertia doesn't allow for rapid dynamic adjustments to compensate well for turbulence.
Historically, Zeppelin was a luxury form of travel in the 01930s, until the Hindenburg crash.
And smoother than a Ford Triplane, I don't doubt: but still dangerous and harsh in heavy weather. Heavily subsidized by the NAZI state as well, as a prestige achievement.
Until the Hindenburg crash, the safety record of passenger airships was superb; the Hindenburg crash wasn't due to heavy weather, and passenger airship service ended the next day. On what basis do you claim that it was dangerous and harsh in heavy weather?
State subsidies for the German airship industry began long before the NAZI takeover, but it's true that the NAZIS did continue them.
State subsidies for the German airship industry began long before the NAZI takeover, but it's true that the NAZIS did continue them.
I think the NAZIs instantiated regular passenger service, so there was no earlier safety record for that. It took a lot of direct subsidy to pay a good chunk of the fare (not just the regular zep RandD)! Of course, the Hindenburg crash wasn't due to heavy weather. Many dirigible crashes happened in heavy weather, particularly US and British versions. See R101 (rainstorm) and USS Akron (storm). Downdrafts are particularly nasty as well. Air resistance goes up by the square of velocity and these are large, relatively light objects, so this is hardly surprising.
I think you're right about those things, so I wonder why passenger airship service was so much safer. The article claims that those two accidents were also caused by inadequate structural strength and flight instrument failure, so maybe the Zeppelins were just better made?
Certainly the Germans, as the inventors, had far more experience building dirigibles; they weren't suffering outright structural failures causing crashes, as happened to the Brits in the same era. Or course, dirigibles weren't the safest way of booking air passage across the Atlantic then, except in so far as they were the only way to book an air passage. Still the Hindenburg may have suffered a fire due to aluminum paint on the skin catching fire.
Is there much turbulence between LA and Vegas at 2000 feet?
Yes it's sometimes pretty bad. Just depends on the conditions at the time.
https://www.usatoday.com/story/travel/airline-news/2019/07/0...
https://www.usatoday.com/story/travel/airline-news/2019/07/0...
I'm firmly in the camp of "I'll believe it when I see it" for modern cargo airships actually going into use. People have been trying to do it since cargolifter AG in Germany raised vc money and went bankrupt 22 years ago. Thus far, none successfully.
And when you don’t have freight to transport, transport yourself, soon…
https://oceanskycruises.com/
https://oceanskycruises.com/
If it's filled with helium, I guess it won't scale to replace the thousands of aircrafts in operation due to the finite amount of helium on earth.
If it's filled with hydrogen, then people should remember the Hindenburg tragedy (and R101 too, glorified in Iron Maiden's "Empire of the clouds")...
Hindenburg is brought up in every single article about airships, so reminding people to remember is rather redundant. It happened 80 years ago. 30 people died. There might even have been one or two people looking into the causes over the last century in the hope of improving things. It was a PR disaster more than anything. When 1500+ people died on the Titanic, it lacked movie reels of explosions and thus we still sail the seas. And now we have TV news, where nothing of note happens unless there is a camera to catch the carnage.
Actually my point was not to emphasize on this tragedy, but rather to highlight that the "solution" (to use helium instead of hydrogen) would probably only work at low scale considering how limited helium exist on earth...
If we want to scale airships (which I would be delighted to see), then I guess we have to go back to hydrogen, and then I would like to see how they would proceed to ensure safety.
If we want to scale airships (which I would be delighted to see), then I guess we have to go back to hydrogen, and then I would like to see how they would proceed to ensure safety.
Sounds nice, until Amazon starts using them for freight transport.
I'm old enough to have seen this suggestion refloated for going on five decades. It keeps on not happening, and the older I get, the more I understand why. There are simply massive constraints on large-scale airship development, construction, and operation. Niche applications: maybe. Widespread adoption in the face of extant or potential viable alterantives? No.
More in this 9-month old comment of mine: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29611076>
And from others in a thread from just over a year ago: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28119943>
What I'm thinking instead:
Ground transportation should see a revolution in rail, particularly in flexibly coupled-and-decoupled trainsets which would eliminate marshalling issues for present freight rail systems. "High speed" transcontinental freight presently tends to take 10--30 days by rail. This could be significantly improved on. Worse, the lack of flexibility makes short haul rail freight, < 500 mi / 1,000 km, highly impractical, and prefers tucks. For all the talk of EV-based trucking, rail is still vastly more efficient in terms of mass moved distance per unit energy, it's the organisation that's utterly lacking, and there seems to be vanishingly little research into this area as I've mentioned in some previous comments.
Electrified air transport seems to me a fairly unlikely option for anything other than small-passenger count short-haul (~100 mile or so) commute hops at speeds low enough that high-speed rail is almost certainly a viable contender.
The interesting question is transoceanic transport, and here I've been thinking that submerged floating tunnels, as proposed for Norway's fjord-spanning highway projects, might be an option. Shorter links (Bearing Strait) could be achieved by conventional tunnels, and much of the Indonesian archipelago might be joined similarly or with bridges. The notion of a transatlantic link, perhaps from Newfoundland to Scotland, or from Brazil to Western Africa, would require traversing about 3,000 mi / 5,000 km of open water. The notion of a tunnel floating at 20--50m depths is provocative and not entirely implausible. I'd suspect such projects might best be piloted as automated freight conduits first, with live human passenger travel coming afterward. It's possible to link at least five or six continents within reason, and possibly even Antarctica.
Trans-Atlantic transit times might range from 15 hours at conventional speeds (240 kph / 150 mph) to as little as 2.5 hours in a hyperloop-like evacuated tube at 1,600 kph / 1,000 mph. Even at a more modest 300 kph / 186 mph an overnight journey could be made (16 hours).
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Submerged_floating_tunnel>
I've ... floated this concept a few times on HN without any nibbles so far.
<https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...>
More in this 9-month old comment of mine: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29611076>
And from others in a thread from just over a year ago: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28119943>
What I'm thinking instead:
Ground transportation should see a revolution in rail, particularly in flexibly coupled-and-decoupled trainsets which would eliminate marshalling issues for present freight rail systems. "High speed" transcontinental freight presently tends to take 10--30 days by rail. This could be significantly improved on. Worse, the lack of flexibility makes short haul rail freight, < 500 mi / 1,000 km, highly impractical, and prefers tucks. For all the talk of EV-based trucking, rail is still vastly more efficient in terms of mass moved distance per unit energy, it's the organisation that's utterly lacking, and there seems to be vanishingly little research into this area as I've mentioned in some previous comments.
Electrified air transport seems to me a fairly unlikely option for anything other than small-passenger count short-haul (~100 mile or so) commute hops at speeds low enough that high-speed rail is almost certainly a viable contender.
The interesting question is transoceanic transport, and here I've been thinking that submerged floating tunnels, as proposed for Norway's fjord-spanning highway projects, might be an option. Shorter links (Bearing Strait) could be achieved by conventional tunnels, and much of the Indonesian archipelago might be joined similarly or with bridges. The notion of a transatlantic link, perhaps from Newfoundland to Scotland, or from Brazil to Western Africa, would require traversing about 3,000 mi / 5,000 km of open water. The notion of a tunnel floating at 20--50m depths is provocative and not entirely implausible. I'd suspect such projects might best be piloted as automated freight conduits first, with live human passenger travel coming afterward. It's possible to link at least five or six continents within reason, and possibly even Antarctica.
Trans-Atlantic transit times might range from 15 hours at conventional speeds (240 kph / 150 mph) to as little as 2.5 hours in a hyperloop-like evacuated tube at 1,600 kph / 1,000 mph. Even at a more modest 300 kph / 186 mph an overnight journey could be made (16 hours).
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Submerged_floating_tunnel>
I've ... floated this concept a few times on HN without any nibbles so far.
<https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...>
The floating bridge idea is pretty interesting. I will say that here in Seattle we have deep experience. We commute on what is known as the 520 bridge, known by the rest of the world as the Evergreen Point Floating Bridge[1]. It took close to 30 years and billions of dollars to reach 1.5 miles across the way. Conservatively it's something close to $3 billion per mile. Some of the pontoons still got cracked late in construction.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evergreen_Point_Floating_Bridg...
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evergreen_Point_Floating_Bridg...
The concept would have more in common with the BART Transbay Tube, which itself is an immersed tube design, with a maximum depth approximating what might be necessary for a transoceanic floating tunnel: 41m (135 ft) below sea level, built in 57 sections.
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transbay_Tube>
That cost $180 million (1970), just shy of a billion dollars in 2020, with actual structural construction (not including tracks and electrical) taking four years (1965--1969). Total length is 3.6 miles (5.8 km), so costs seem rather lower than the 520 bridge.
The immersed tube doesn't float, which introduces additional considerations, but is similar in that components are fabricated offsite then assembled and connected at the site itself, usually on or just under the seabed or lakebed.
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Immersed_tube>
That said, at $1b/3mi, a 3,000 mi link would run about a trillion dollars. It might of course be several times that.
Comparing to commercial aviation: Wikipedia gives 44 one-way million transatlantic flight seats offered in 2015, citing The Transatlantic Market <http://www.anna.aero/wp-content/uploads/2015/06/150603-conne...> At $500 per seat, that's $22 billion or so in annual passenger traffic, or a 45 year payback time based on a $1 trillion tunnel cost. Probably not a great prospect.
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transbay_Tube>
That cost $180 million (1970), just shy of a billion dollars in 2020, with actual structural construction (not including tracks and electrical) taking four years (1965--1969). Total length is 3.6 miles (5.8 km), so costs seem rather lower than the 520 bridge.
The immersed tube doesn't float, which introduces additional considerations, but is similar in that components are fabricated offsite then assembled and connected at the site itself, usually on or just under the seabed or lakebed.
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Immersed_tube>
That said, at $1b/3mi, a 3,000 mi link would run about a trillion dollars. It might of course be several times that.
Comparing to commercial aviation: Wikipedia gives 44 one-way million transatlantic flight seats offered in 2015, citing The Transatlantic Market <http://www.anna.aero/wp-content/uploads/2015/06/150603-conne...> At $500 per seat, that's $22 billion or so in annual passenger traffic, or a 45 year payback time based on a $1 trillion tunnel cost. Probably not a great prospect.
It would be nice. The problem is the same as self-driving cars: they work but ONLY in certain very constrained and limited application scenarios that limit their adoption.
Self-driving cars will never do well in snow country during a blizzard.
Airships will never do well in thunderstorms or other similar severe weather.
Failing to recognize the limitations of an idea or technology is the #1 way innovators, inventors and startups fail - they lack the critical thinking rigor and fail to nip bad ideas in the bud because they are too emotionally attached (by ego or by lack of brain cells) to KILL their bad ideas. You attack your own ideas as aggressively as any competitor would to get good ideas.
Self-driving cars will never do well in snow country during a blizzard.
Airships will never do well in thunderstorms or other similar severe weather.
Failing to recognize the limitations of an idea or technology is the #1 way innovators, inventors and startups fail - they lack the critical thinking rigor and fail to nip bad ideas in the bud because they are too emotionally attached (by ego or by lack of brain cells) to KILL their bad ideas. You attack your own ideas as aggressively as any competitor would to get good ideas.
> Self-driving cars will never do well in snow country during a blizzard.
> Failing to recognize the limitations of an idea or technology is the #1 way innovators, inventors and startups fail - they lack the critical thinking rigor and fail to nip bad ideas
Another failing is to assume your experience is the norm and failing to identify significant market niches.
I'm not sure if you meaning to, but you comment hints that you think self driving cars won't succeed because they cannot drive well in blizzards. I will tell you now that a significant portion of the worlds population has never experienced a blizzard, let alone attempted to drive in one.
If you were just using blizzards as one example of many for the reasons automated cars will fail to catch on, my apologies. That said, I think it's a great go to market strategy to identify a smaller niche to start with, and slowly expand as your product utility increases to service broader markets.
> Failing to recognize the limitations of an idea or technology is the #1 way innovators, inventors and startups fail - they lack the critical thinking rigor and fail to nip bad ideas
Another failing is to assume your experience is the norm and failing to identify significant market niches.
I'm not sure if you meaning to, but you comment hints that you think self driving cars won't succeed because they cannot drive well in blizzards. I will tell you now that a significant portion of the worlds population has never experienced a blizzard, let alone attempted to drive in one.
If you were just using blizzards as one example of many for the reasons automated cars will fail to catch on, my apologies. That said, I think it's a great go to market strategy to identify a smaller niche to start with, and slowly expand as your product utility increases to service broader markets.
> Failing to recognize the limitations of an idea or technology is the #1 way innovators, inventors and startups fail - they lack the critical thinking rigor and fail to nip bad ideas in the bud because they are too emotionally attached (by ego or by lack of brain cells) to KILL their bad ideas. You attack your own ideas as aggressively as any competitor would to get good ideas.
I vouched for this comment based on this paragraph. I have watched this play out in press releases over and over: an innovation is presented as the next huge revolution in X, where it is actually a great improvement only in section 3.5.227 of X, and overextending it to try to revolutionize the entire field kills the innovation.
I vouched for this comment based on this paragraph. I have watched this play out in press releases over and over: an innovation is presented as the next huge revolution in X, where it is actually a great improvement only in section 3.5.227 of X, and overextending it to try to revolutionize the entire field kills the innovation.
> Self-driving cars will never do well in snow country during a blizzard.
to be more specific, human visible spectrum cameras looking for white lane markers will never do well in snow country.
For certain situations, different technologies are useful.
Drivers without polarized glasses won't perform optimally in snow or rain.
You include technologies like lidar, infrared, and radar and self driving can "see" a lot more in the snow and rain at a much longer distance than 20/20 vision through a safety windshield, with wipers.
"Self driving" "cars" that aren't dependent on properly marked roads, aren't sharing with human drivers, she drive at a "safe" speed will do just fine.
to be more specific, human visible spectrum cameras looking for white lane markers will never do well in snow country.
For certain situations, different technologies are useful.
Drivers without polarized glasses won't perform optimally in snow or rain.
You include technologies like lidar, infrared, and radar and self driving can "see" a lot more in the snow and rain at a much longer distance than 20/20 vision through a safety windshield, with wipers.
"Self driving" "cars" that aren't dependent on properly marked roads, aren't sharing with human drivers, she drive at a "safe" speed will do just fine.
> "Self driving" "cars" that aren't dependent on properly marked roads, aren't sharing with human drivers, she drive at a "safe" speed will do just fine.
Then you've just reinvented personal rapid transit, which has failed in the past because in general building totally separate rights of way only really works out cost-wise with really space-efficient modes like trains.
Then you've just reinvented personal rapid transit, which has failed in the past because in general building totally separate rights of way only really works out cost-wise with really space-efficient modes like trains.
Don't forget infrastructure updates and vehicle to vehicle communications!
There's a corollary to your last paragraph:
Failing to recognize the limitations of an idea or technology is the #1 way innovators, inventors and startups succeed, too!
Every innovator I've talked to, when I asked them, "if you knew ahead of time all the problems with your original idea, would you have gone through the trouble?", all answer pretty much the same way: The only reason they saw it through was that at any point, they thought "That's gotta be the worst part. Now how hard can the rest of it really be?"
Failing to recognize the limitations of an idea or technology is the #1 way innovators, inventors and startups succeed, too!
Every innovator I've talked to, when I asked them, "if you knew ahead of time all the problems with your original idea, would you have gone through the trouble?", all answer pretty much the same way: The only reason they saw it through was that at any point, they thought "That's gotta be the worst part. Now how hard can the rest of it really be?"
One fine example of persistence in the face of seemingly insurmountable challenges paying off is ASML development of EUV [1] [2] [3].
[1] https://www.wired.com/story/asml-extreme-ultraviolet-lithogr...
[2] https://www.cnbc.com/2022/03/23/inside-asml-the-company-adva...
[3] https://www.asml.com/en/news/stories
[1] https://www.wired.com/story/asml-extreme-ultraviolet-lithogr...
[2] https://www.cnbc.com/2022/03/23/inside-asml-the-company-adva...
[3] https://www.asml.com/en/news/stories
You need about 1000 liters of helium or hydrogen to lift 1kg of cargo (the difference is only about 10%, despite the fact that H2 is twice as light as He they are both so much lighter than air, that you can almost think they are weightless, so all that matters is the mass of air displaced).
Let's say you want to lift 1 ton. You need a cube of balloon that's 10m x 10m x 10m. Let's put 4 of those next to each other, so you can lift 4 tons with a box-shaped balloon that's 40m x 10m x 10m. Let's make it a cylinder instead, and make the Soviet assumption that pi=3, we end up with a cylindrical balloon that's 40m long and 10m tall and can lift 3 tons. Since the ends of an actual dirigible are not quite flat, let's say you need a 50m long and 10m tall dirigible to lift about 3 tons. The ratio of lengt/height of Hindenburg was 7:1 and of Graff Zeppelin was 6:1. Current Goodyear blimps have a ratio of about 4:1.
So our intuition building block is a dirigible that's 50m long and 10m tall and can lift 3 tons.
Multiply that by 10 in all dimensions and you get a 500m long by 100m tall giant that can lift a whopping 3000 tons of cargo.
Multiply by only 5 in all dimensions and you get a 250m long by 50m tall dirigible that can lift 375 tons of cargo. That is a large dirigible, but not impossibly large. That was roughly the size of Hindenburg: 41 m tall and 245 m long.
Hindenburg was build 100 years ago. We can probably build one like that nowadays for much less. How about one that's double in size in all dimensions? I find that conceivable. And such a dirigible would have 3000 tons of lift. Can you imagine that? For comparison, the cargo capacity of the famous Liberty ships was about 4300 tons. You could get airlift capacity that's only available nowadays as sealift.