[metalman]

Cargo airships will not happen,in any land based area where wind happens,ie :anywhere this has been hammered flat on numerous aviation engineering forums the only way around the guaranteed ground handling debaucle is to engineer mega structur masts for anchoring,which will need to have a circular pad underneath,where the cargo would have to follow the LTA,as it pivots in the wind so back to a debaucle,with lots of smashing stuff one possibility is airship to ocean ship transfers where wind drift can be managed.....sort of could be made to work for passengers snd small cargo that loads through the central pivot in the mast still the anchoring phase will always be very high risk

[usrusr]

It absolutely can happen, but not for routine goods where being on schedule is highly important. But for outsize goods, waiting for a favorable weather forecast is a much smaller concern than strengthening roads or perhaps even removing a bridge or two. For how wind turbine deployment, freight airship would be a gamechanger and there's a long (but truly narrow) tail of more niche use cases. Including any "unknown unkowns" that really can't exist before matching transportation.

The challenge is fitting the engineering required into the revenue that could be expected from those tiny markets It's tempting to characteristize turbine blade delivery as bigger than tiny, but compared to commodity transport like shuttling containers between China and the rest of the world that's still tiny.

[jordanb]

Modern airships are semi-rigid. They have a keel and a rigid structure to support the empennage. The rest of the structure can be deflated and collapsed just like a non-rigid blimp.

[frickinLasers]

I'd bet a bunch of former SpaceX engineers will figure out a solution.

[panick21_]

There are tons of dumb startups that were created by former SpaceX people. Having worked at SpaceX doesn't magically turn you into a superior person that can solve all problems. But having worked at SpaceX is a great way to convinced investors to give you money.

[peterashford]

Yeah, dude was head of Hyperloop. Nailed that one

[dralley]

Hyperloop succeeded at exactly what it was meant to succeed at, which was planting just enough FOMO to get a handful of rail projects in California delayed and ultimately canceled.

[frickinLasers]

I take your point in that there are a lot of naysayers here, as there were with Hyperloop. There were also hundreds of volunteers working on the project, who clearly thought it had a chance of working--and many more saying rockets would never be made reusable, it had been tried before, too many problems that can never be solved...

“Success is stumbling from failure to failure with no loss of enthusiasm.” - Winston Churchill

[pclmulqdq]

Why do people lionize trying ideas that are known to be dumb and/or impossible? Is it because we just no longer believe that things truly are impossible (or dumb)? The ideas that all turn out to be "impossible" successes are ones where the math or physics bears out the idea but the engineering is "impossible."

Hyperloop (and vacuum train systems for the ~100 years they were called that before the Musk rebrand) had physics problems, and no matter how hard anyone tried, they were guaranteed to run into them. Cargo airships also have a physics problem that make them absurdly expensive and risky to put cargo on. In both cases, this is an idea that is 100 years old and where the physics has been studied. This time is not different unless you have solid reasoning.

Contrast that with rockets, to use another Musk example: Rockets are well within the bounds of physics, but a hard engineering problem. Landing a rocket propulsively was also known to be an "impossible" engineering challenge that was first demonstrated in the 1990's (with too low reliability).

[perilunar]

> Landing a rocket propulsively was also known to be an "impossible" engineering challenge that was first demonstrated in the 1990's (with too low reliability).

No it wasn't. It was done many times in the 60s and 70s — e.g. all the moon landings.

[frickinLasers]

Well, TIL something I thought was demonstrated mid-century didn't happen until the 90s.

[Qwertious]

>Why do people lionize trying ideas that are known to be dumb and/or impossible?

Because airships are really cool.

[frickinLasers]

Because airships are simple and cheap, and as the blog post says: if they can get cargo point-to-point across the Atlantic, they will put air freight out of business.

If they can't do that, at least they could be competitive.

[pclmulqdq]

Great, form an airship club. Stop throwing $100 million after $100 million of your investors' cash at your hobby.

[cjbgkagh]

Apples and oranges. Of my many engineer friends none of them thought the hyper loop was viable, it’s an absurdly bad idea. Like installing compressed air jets in cars for faster acceleration. Another one of Elons missives.

Reusable rockets were more of an economic issue, is there enough demand for economic viability. That was always going to be the real magic. I think that is still an open question but it at least appears plausible.

[Wytwwww]

Even if they solve most of the technical issues could this ever be competitive with planes/ships/trucks? Under what circumstances?

It just doesn't seem very practical, basically you'd need to transport freight to places with no access to sea/roads or rails and can't fit it on an airplane. Is there a lot of demand for this? Also presumably such areas would have harsh and unpredictable weather..

> Success is stumbling from failure to failure with no loss of enthusiasm

Survivor bias? For every case of it working out there are many more of people wasting time and enthusiasm on something that's a dead end (and this was the general consensus for the past 80 years or so)

[usrusr]

Some loads simply don't fit on trucks, or rather on the roads that the trucks have to use. Heavy lift airship would operate in a market segment that does not even exist without them.

[Wytwwww]

> market segment

So I'm just curious what is that segment and how large ($) can it be? What cargo exactly would it be transporting?