A new Era of Airships to come upon us?
You know state where I live saw the death and the rebirth of one of the coolest vehicles ever built by humans (sans the bicycle). When the Hindenburg crashed the era of airships came to an unforeseen end - even so the concepts for future airships had everything you ever wanted - slow quite low fuel flight across the world. The problem with the Hindenburg was of course the wrong filling - you ainīt put a high explosive gas in huge quantities atop people and wrap it with burning fabric and install sparking engine beneath it - the consequences where that the only airships you could see since then have been the small blimps that are mainly used for advertisments and low altitude tourist tours (very few at that). about 10 years ago not far from where the Hindenburg crashed someone secured lots of funds from the government to revive the airship in all its glory. Sadly the guy was not good at bussiness and besides building the biggest hall mankind ever build - for the construction of the airships - nothing has come out of this endeavoure except the dream that airships are actually a really nice way to travel and transport goods (if you leave out the highly exploding hydrogen of course). The concepts even showed feasibility to transport goods as much as trains do but with much less environmental cost. Now the construction hall is a fake rainforest eating up so much CO2 that you could power a whole city and need another rainforest to offset the costs - and its horrible sterile from what I heard.
So by now you should be aware that I love airships - to my delight Inhabitat - my favorite "green" blog - has posted an article about a Zeppelin that could be straight out of a sci-fi movie - except that it exists and roams the earth pedal powered (so it combines the two most amazing vehicles ever created by mankind ;) in a zen slow smooth kind of way. It can land everywhere without any infrastructure needed.
The caveat? Helium - the gas that fills the sail.
Although the gas is the second most abundant element in the universe, it is a relatively rare and finite resource on Earth and must be extracted via low temperature gas liquefaction or recovered from natural gas.
There always is a problem... Nonetheless there is hope that this might catch on and we find a synthetic gas that can be had more easy!
More pictures here.