9 ms·

Buoyant wants to solve middle-mile delivery with cargo airships

68 points by prostoalex 5y ago

joshuaheard 5y ago
I love this idea. Airships development stalled over the fear of another Hindenbuerg. Buoyant could be a good alternative for this sort of transportation need.
abakker 5y ago
Can a physicist help me understand something here? Assuming each of these can carry ~650lbs at 30mph. They're 60feet long and have a VERY lightweight airframe. How would these craft deal with wind? do they just get blown away every time there is a gust?
- MichaelGroves 5y ago
  Wind will never not be a problem for airships. At best, modern weather radars and forecasting might allow airships to avoid storms better than their early 20th century counterparts did. Incidentally, a lot of casual airship fans pin hopes on helium instead of hydrogen to keep airships safe. But the deadliest airship disaster in history was a helium airship, the USS Akron, which was destroyed by bad weather killing 73 of the 76 aboard.
  - perl4ever 5y ago
    >the deadliest airship disaster in history was a helium airship I think that may be a misleading way to put it. "Most casualties had been caused by drowning and hypothermia, since the crew had not been issued life jackets, and there had not been time to deploy the single life raft" When a large airplane enters heavy turbulence, stalls and falls into the sea, I don't think that would be the usual scenario.
    - MichaelGroves 5y ago
      I don't think that is misleading; a storm downed the airship, resulting in nearly all the crew dying. That they didn't die on impact doesn't change things. If a torpedo sank a ship and most of the crew died from exposure in the water rather than the explosion (USS Indianapolis), you'd not say that torpedoes aren't a major threat to ships. Regardless, if you don't like that example, pick from the list: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_airship_accidents https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_airship_accidents Another comment elsewhere in this discussion says that airships stalled for fear of another Hindenberg. 'Fear' suggests some measure of irrationality, as though the Hindenberg were a one-off accident. The reality is these things were crashing all the time. People had ample reason to rationally expect airships would continue to crash.
  - jodrellblank 5y ago
    > "might allow airships to avoid storms better than their early 20th century counterparts did" Not sure they wanted to; from [1]: "To maintain altitude, Hindenburg would brush against clouds and collect rainwater in gutters that fed the ballast tanks. If we passed through a shower every few hours there was no need to release gas. There were occasions when no rain was available, but we were rarely far from a suitable shower." [1] https://www.airspacemag.com/history-of-flight/crossing-atlantic-ihindenbergi-180978188/ https://www.airspacemag.com/history-of-flight/crossing-atlan...
    - lachstar-x 5y ago
      That is the coolest thing. Reminds me of cloudscoops mining He3 from gas giants in science fiction books
  - jodrellblank 5y ago
    > "But the deadliest airship disaster in history was a helium airship, the USS Akron, which was destroyed by bad weather killing 73 of the 76 aboard." Worse than that in fate's sense of irony, after the Hindenburg disaster the US authorities banned Hydrogen as a lifting gas and built the USS Shenandoah as a Helium airship. When a Hydrogen airship of that era flew too high it had valves at the top to vent Hydrogen to the atmosphere and reduce buoyancy, but Helium was 50x-100x more expensive and the Sheandoah had its valves sealed so the crew couldn't waste any of it. It hit a turbulent updraft, rose so high the gas pressure in the balloons was past spec, and this is suspected to have contributed to it breaking up and crashing, killing 14 people. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USS_Shenandoah_%28ZR-1%29#Crash_of_Shenandoah https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USS_Shenandoah_%28ZR-1%29#Cras...
- thrill 5y ago
  Wind is generally able to be forecast fairly well today. Applications sensitive to wind, especially to gusts, as light weight large side area vehicles will be, are going to be not usable when it's gusty. But that doesn't mean they're going to be not usable often enough to not be cost effective, and there may be options suitable to the specific mission to, for example, deliver a package simply nearby instead of at the destination. There's also other design shapes, one of which I'm a little familiar with being Skylifter, that is saucer shaped. Their target audience is heavy lift, but they were very intent on minimizing wind effects and so chose that shape. This specific shape though will be suitable a lot of the time for a lot of missions, and may even be more cost effective than a different shape - my non-CFD'd thought here is that the long skinny shape will likely get more lift from flow than a saucer. Maybe someone has done that research, as I'd love to read through it.
  - robocat 5y ago
    There’s a video of their 3 metre diameter prototype here: https://phys.org/news/2010-10-skylifter-airship-day-video.html https://phys.org/news/2010-10-skylifter-airship-day-video.ht...
- EMM_386 5y ago
  They responded to my question about this here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28278849 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28278849
  - labcomputer 5y ago
    That... doesn't give me much optimism. They were asked about wind but they answered the question they wish they'd been asked (fog).
    - elihu 5y ago
      They were asked variations of the same question several times. Here's one of the more informative responses: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28278843 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28278843
- petermcneeley 5y ago
  The top speed can be taken as simply relative to a constant wind speed. Say they have a max speed of 30mph heading against the wind at 25mph. The net will simply be 5mph aka super slow. Gusty wind is more complex as it depends on cumulative drag factor. You can estimate their forward drag by knowledge about the motors they are using (energy -> drag work). Likely, unless their motors are tiny, the even the forward drag is quite high. This is why their max speed is not something like 300km/h. TLDR: its just like airplanes only much worse
- joefigura 5y ago
  One clarification, the full-scale version's max speed is ~75 mph, and typical cruise speeds will be 50-60 mph. The 35 mph number in the article is our subscale prototype. We loose range in a headwind, but on most days the aircraft has more than enough range to complete our target missions. And on the days the weather's too bad to fly, many other small aircraft are grounded too. - Joe from Buoyant
frakkingcylons 5y ago
Their Launch HN thread from 4 days ago has some interesting discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28278515 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28278515
- joefigura 5y ago
  Thanks for linking! Cool to see this on HN again
not-my-account 5y ago
How would the moving price of Helium affect operations? Or rather, what would the range of Helium prices have to be in order to be profitable? The common trope is that "The world is running out of Helium", yet it seems like that is not actually true [1][2]. I'd be interested to hear how this is all being taken into account. [1] https://physicstoday.scitation.org/do/10.1063/PT.6.2.20200605a/full/ https://physicstoday.scitation.org/do/10.1063/PT.6.2.2020060... [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mOy8Xjaa_o8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mOy8Xjaa_o8
- ummonk 5y ago
  We aren’t running out of helium in the short-medium term but it’s still definitely a limited resource and there is a legitimate concern about losing access to terrestrial helium once we’ve extracted all we can. Unlike fossil fuels, helium isn’t something we can synthesize from elements that are abundant on Earth.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - User23 5y ago
    Here's hoping we get that fusion reactor problem solved.
- elihu 5y ago
  In their Q&A thread the other day I believe they said that helium price isn't likely to impact them all that much in the short term. Maybe they'll use hydrogen at some point in the future, but it seems like they don't think it's necessary for their business model to work, given the relatively small size of their airships.
jen20 5y ago
This is a neat idea. I did spend the time while the page loaded wondering "wow, a service mesh to cargo airships is quite the leap" however!
- glitchcrab 5y ago
  Yeah I had the same confusion when the Launch thread was posted. Choosing company names is hard.
  - joefigura 5y ago
    The full company name is "Buoyant Aero" for that reason! We often shorten it to Buoyant, but may use the full name more if it's a recurring point of confusion.
bee_rider 5y ago
Apparently they are getting ~70% of their lift from the buoyancy and ~30% from their propeller. In the video included in the article, they show their prototype flying. It is surprisingly lively for a blimp (I guess owing to the fact that it gets/needs lift from the propeller), darting around in an almost fish-like fashion. I dunno, still skeptical but the video does make it seem much more plausible, at least.
hellbannedguy 5y ago
This has been on here a few days ago. I didn't want to say anything, but have been thinking about the payload. I belive it's 675 lbs. That is not much. A truck can deliver thousands of pounds. (I have weight on my mind because I have to pick up a 800 lb mill, and bring it home in one piece.) It might make sense in Alaska delivering small amounts of material though, but not near power lines.
- elihu 5y ago
  The idea is they aren't delivering to houses directly, they're moving packages between shipping facilities. So, they can presumably having landing pads on either side that aren't near power lines. 675 pounds isn't much, but if you have a high-priority delivery that's not very heavy it might make a lot of sense. Especially in remote places; they're particularly interested in serving places that are currently served by planes and helicopters, like remote locations in Alaska.
  - joefigura 5y ago
    Yup, this is basically it. It's impossible to compete with a truck that's fully loaded, but there are tons of short middle mile trips where trucks aren't fully loaded (LTL or less-than-truckload freight). This type of freight is surprisingly inefficient, particularly in low density areas.
    - crote 5y ago
      It's very easy to compete with a truck in some areas of Alaska: they simply aren't reachable by road! If freight has to be brought in either by boat or by plane, an autonomous blimp suddenly sounds like a great alternative.
      - amelius 5y ago
        Except if the weather conditions force you to delay the shipment.
RcouF1uZ4gsC 5y ago
> Buoyant has built and flown four prototype airships. The most recent sub-scale ship that went to air is 20 feet long, with airspeeds of up to 35 miles per hour and a payload capacity of 10 pounds, but the ultimate aim is to build an airship that’s capable of delivering up to 650 pounds of cargo at a cruise speed of around 60 miles per hour. For depot to depot delivery, how does that compare with an 18 wheeler truck with 30,000 lbs carrying capacity going down the road at 60 miles per hour?
- ThatCaio 5y ago
  The current design is made to compete with small cargo planes to remote small landlocked cities like many in Alaska with no roads. To be able to compete with trucks they would need a significantly bigger airship as efficiency scales with size.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
thepasswordis 5y ago
Okay I don't get it. In the launch HN, they said their craft is 60 feet long and costs hundreds of thousands of dollars. Doesn't that basically describe a semi truck? Or an airplane? So is the pitch here a way to eliminate the labor costs of trucking by going somewhere that doesn't have much to run into? The typical way that companies like FedEx solve this problem is with an airplane called the Cessna Caravan. It's an awesome plane, it can carry a (figurtive) ton of weight, it's fast, it's reliable, it can land on primitive fields, it has a long range, and it is incredibly well established wrt regulations, and processes.
- gpm 5y ago
  You'll probably get a better answer from one of the people involved in the project, but I'll take a stab at this. The right comparison is an airplane not a semi-truck. If you can drive a semi somewhere it doesn't seem like this makes much sense. It carries substantially less (it looks like ~1/4 the mass), but it looks like you can buy more than 4 of these for the cost of 1 Cessna Caravan (wikipedia quotes a few million dollars for one of those, and the quote in this thread is a few hundred thousand dollars for an airship). You need 0 pilots to move those 4 around instead of 1 to fly the airplane, and the claim seems to be that it's more fuel efficient per kilogram-meter so those 4 should take less fuel too. Moreover you're getting increased flexibility because if you only need a fraction of the weight, you don't need to send all 4. You also get vtol take-off and landing with the airships.
  - joefigura 5y ago
    Yep, this is a pretty accurate. If you have a full truckload of stuff, small air freight cannot compete. But if you're trying to move a single pallet, the airship is the best way to do it. The one thing I'd add is that we deliberately chose 650 lbs to go a size class lower than a Cessna Caravan, because autonomy has enormous benefits for a 650 lb payload aircraft. At that size the pilot alone takes up 1/4 of your payload capacity!
    - lachstar-x 5y ago
      Additionally, operating costs of a semi truck that's going to remote areas are incredibly huge - not only safety equipment, driver pay, but fuel costs as well - that you might be surprised how competitive airships are. Have you looked at the numbers for that? What about building your own lightweight carbon fibre container that is filled and emptied at your location, instead of dropping off the entire package?
davedunkin 5y ago
I thought this was the Buoyant that makes the Linkerd service mesh. "Middle-mile delivery" and "cargo airships" must be new cloud metaphors. I was so confused.
chrisbrandow 5y ago
First question that comes to my mind is, “How much helium will this use if it scales”. Helium is still non-renewable, and it’s still pretty critical for MRIs among other critical analytical instruments. Probably insignificant. But it’s still the question I have.
- bombcar 5y ago
  Hydrogen can be made safe, and is renewable. For something like this to work we need to move past the Hindenburg.
  - nosianu 5y ago
    I think to have once read that World War I fights against Zeppelins showed that igniting the hydrogen proved to actually be quite hard. Only when they were able to open significant holes and used special ammunition did that work. Not enough hydrogen would escape and mix with air and remain in one place to accumulate to cause an explosion. There needed to be a big hole first for enough hydrogen to mix with air, plus the spark to ignite it. That was WWI airplanes over Britain attacking Zeppelins with their machine guns. There were a lot of compartments too, it was not all one giant space of hydrogen. EDIT: I found it mentioned in https://www.military-history.org/feature/german-zeppelins-of-wwi.htm https://www.military-history.org/feature/german-zeppelins-of... > That autumn, the British pilots deployed a new weapon. No longer dependent on dropping bombs or explosive darts over the side, nor on the standard machine-gun ammunition that appeared to have no effect whatever on the giant gas-bags, the home-defence squadrons now filled their ammunition belts with a mixture of tracer and newly-designed explosive and incendiary bullets. The idea was to blow a hole in the fabric of an airship and then ignite the escaping hydrogen as it mixed with air. Of course, once successfully blown open and ignited it would go up in flames like a torch. But it wasn't quite that simple to get to that point.
    - bombcar 5y ago
      It’s lighter than air so the flames burn hot but the gas is going up too - and the ship is losing lift and going down at the same time. It’s a good combination if you have to be on fire. The main key would be a gasbag that’s not flammable.
giantrobot 5y ago
I'm a huge fan of lighter than air craft and have been for many years, decades now. So saying that, I don't see this system ever actually working in the real world. * If the departure and arrival points currently exist, they likely have roads available. Even the best case autonomous airship isn't going to be cheaper than a truck. * With a maximum cargo capacity of 650lbs whatever cargo loaded onto an airship will likely have to be broken down. A standard 48"x48" pallet can easily be loaded with two to three times that weight. * FAA regulations for helicopter landing pads [0] want a final approach, take off (FATO) area to be 1.5x the overall length of a helicopter. For an airship with partially aerodynamic lift I don't see why this wouldn't be larger but if it was the same you'd need a FATO area 90' on a side for a 60' long airship. * The airship terminals would need their infrastructure and operations to include these huge cleared areas for the airships. A lot of consideration would need to go into vertical clearance for things like fork lifts because of the overhang dimensions of the airship. * Urban heat islands and microclimates will severely hamper airships in ways that heavier than air craft don't worry about. While I'm not in love with trucks, they make far more sense than airships for cargo in 99% of all cases. For one trailers and tractors don't need to be handled at the same time. A container(s) can be broken down and pallets moved to trailers and then a tractor called in once that's complete to move it out. They also don't require some huge land area for loading and unloading. Middle mile terminals will have loading docks and/or forklifts. A mechanical problem with a tractor or trailer can be handled relatively easily on-site. If an autonomous airship has an issue at the terminal it can't be towed away easily unless even more space is dedicated to storage. If it breaks down during transport it can land on all sorts of stuff that doesn't want a half ton of airship landing on it. [0] https://www.faa.gov/documentLibrary/media/Advisory_Circular/150_5390_2c.pdf https://www.faa.gov/documentLibrary/media/Advisory_Circular/...
- hilbert42 5y ago
  I'm a fan of airships too and have been for decades, still I think I have to agree with your points. That said, some people obviously don't including those with money to chuck at the problem. What do you say to this report? https://interestingengineering.com/ufo-russian-cargo-airship https://interestingengineering.com/ufo-russian-cargo-airship With lifting and speed specifications like that it'd be a game-changer if they ever pulled it off. It seems to me if its high proposed speed were ever attained in practice then it'd also be useful for passenger services for continental-sized distances (say 1000 to 2000 miles) where its potentially quick embarking/disembarking would be advantageous over normal air travel. (I bookmarked this url some months ago, I think I may have even gotten it from a HN story.)
clueless123 5y ago
How high can this ships go? How Fast? All along the Andes in south america there is a dire need to efficiently move products from high altitude to the coast (where major cities are) In Peru for example, there are hundreds of small farming towns sitting at 10'000+ feet of altitude but just 40 straight line miles from the ocean.. Today to get there, trucks have to use one of the few roads that ,zig-zag up to the high lands before heading into any of this towns. ( an 8 to 16 hour trip ) Being able to ship produce straight down to the big cities on the coast would be a game changer.
- lachstar-x 5y ago
  One of the issues with getting that high is that the higher you go, the less buoyancy the airships have, and you'd need bigger ships with more gas to haul the same loads. But the sky is very big, so it might just be an economics of scale problem
  - clueless123 5y ago
    In this case, ships will be heavily loaded on the way down (carrying heavy produce) and lightly loaded on the way up (carrying lighter products like medicine or high value manufactured goods)
tlubinski 5y ago
CargoLifter tried that (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CargoLifter https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CargoLifter). Founded in 1996, went public around 2000 followed by insolvency in 2002. Their production hanger is now a tropical holiday resort (https://www.tropical-islands.de/en/ https://www.tropical-islands.de/en/).
mvdwoord 5y ago
Why is this redirecting to https:// https:// guce.advertising.com /collectIdentifiers?sessionId=3_cc-session_a5a373d5-c78.. etc All techcrunch links seem to do this . Even if I Google or go to their domain directly. Blocked by nextdns.
ZeroGravitas 5y ago
Is shooting back up into the air after dropping cargo a problem, or an opportunity? If you need to pick up other cargo then some way to cleverly swap the weight from one to the other could be good, but if it's mostly outgoing weight then that doesn't seem to be an actual problem as long as all the connections let go at the same time.

68 points by prostoalex 5y ago

I love this idea. Airships development stalled over the fear of another Hindenbuerg. Buoyant could be a good alternative for this sort of transportation need.

abakker 5y ago

Can a physicist help me understand something here? Assuming each of these can carry ~650lbs at 30mph. They're 60feet long and have a VERY lightweight airframe. How would these craft deal with wind? do they just get blown away every time there is a gust?

MichaelGroves 5y ago
Wind will never not be a problem for airships. At best, modern weather radars and forecasting might allow airships to avoid storms better than their early 20th century counterparts did. Incidentally, a lot of casual airship fans pin hopes on helium instead of hydrogen to keep airships safe. But the deadliest airship disaster in history was a helium airship, the USS Akron, which was destroyed by bad weather killing 73 of the 76 aboard.
- perl4ever 5y ago
  >the deadliest airship disaster in history was a helium airship I think that may be a misleading way to put it. "Most casualties had been caused by drowning and hypothermia, since the crew had not been issued life jackets, and there had not been time to deploy the single life raft" When a large airplane enters heavy turbulence, stalls and falls into the sea, I don't think that would be the usual scenario.
  - MichaelGroves 5y ago
    I don't think that is misleading; a storm downed the airship, resulting in nearly all the crew dying. That they didn't die on impact doesn't change things. If a torpedo sank a ship and most of the crew died from exposure in the water rather than the explosion (USS Indianapolis), you'd not say that torpedoes aren't a major threat to ships. Regardless, if you don't like that example, pick from the list: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_airship_accidents https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_airship_accidents Another comment elsewhere in this discussion says that airships stalled for fear of another Hindenberg. 'Fear' suggests some measure of irrationality, as though the Hindenberg were a one-off accident. The reality is these things were crashing all the time. People had ample reason to rationally expect airships would continue to crash.
- jodrellblank 5y ago
  > "might allow airships to avoid storms better than their early 20th century counterparts did" Not sure they wanted to; from [1]: "To maintain altitude, Hindenburg would brush against clouds and collect rainwater in gutters that fed the ballast tanks. If we passed through a shower every few hours there was no need to release gas. There were occasions when no rain was available, but we were rarely far from a suitable shower." [1] https://www.airspacemag.com/history-of-flight/crossing-atlantic-ihindenbergi-180978188/ https://www.airspacemag.com/history-of-flight/crossing-atlan...
  - lachstar-x 5y ago
    That is the coolest thing. Reminds me of cloudscoops mining He3 from gas giants in science fiction books
- jodrellblank 5y ago
  > "But the deadliest airship disaster in history was a helium airship, the USS Akron, which was destroyed by bad weather killing 73 of the 76 aboard." Worse than that in fate's sense of irony, after the Hindenburg disaster the US authorities banned Hydrogen as a lifting gas and built the USS Shenandoah as a Helium airship. When a Hydrogen airship of that era flew too high it had valves at the top to vent Hydrogen to the atmosphere and reduce buoyancy, but Helium was 50x-100x more expensive and the Sheandoah had its valves sealed so the crew couldn't waste any of it. It hit a turbulent updraft, rose so high the gas pressure in the balloons was past spec, and this is suspected to have contributed to it breaking up and crashing, killing 14 people. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USS_Shenandoah_%28ZR-1%29#Crash_of_Shenandoah https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USS_Shenandoah_%28ZR-1%29#Cras...
thrill 5y ago
Wind is generally able to be forecast fairly well today. Applications sensitive to wind, especially to gusts, as light weight large side area vehicles will be, are going to be not usable when it's gusty. But that doesn't mean they're going to be not usable often enough to not be cost effective, and there may be options suitable to the specific mission to, for example, deliver a package simply nearby instead of at the destination. There's also other design shapes, one of which I'm a little familiar with being Skylifter, that is saucer shaped. Their target audience is heavy lift, but they were very intent on minimizing wind effects and so chose that shape. This specific shape though will be suitable a lot of the time for a lot of missions, and may even be more cost effective than a different shape - my non-CFD'd thought here is that the long skinny shape will likely get more lift from flow than a saucer. Maybe someone has done that research, as I'd love to read through it.
- robocat 5y ago
  There’s a video of their 3 metre diameter prototype here: https://phys.org/news/2010-10-skylifter-airship-day-video.html https://phys.org/news/2010-10-skylifter-airship-day-video.ht...
EMM_386 5y ago
They responded to my question about this here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28278849 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28278849
- labcomputer 5y ago
  That... doesn't give me much optimism. They were asked about wind but they answered the question they wish they'd been asked (fog).
  - elihu 5y ago
    They were asked variations of the same question several times. Here's one of the more informative responses: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28278843 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28278843
petermcneeley 5y ago
The top speed can be taken as simply relative to a constant wind speed. Say they have a max speed of 30mph heading against the wind at 25mph. The net will simply be 5mph aka super slow. Gusty wind is more complex as it depends on cumulative drag factor. You can estimate their forward drag by knowledge about the motors they are using (energy -> drag work). Likely, unless their motors are tiny, the even the forward drag is quite high. This is why their max speed is not something like 300km/h. TLDR: its just like airplanes only much worse
joefigura 5y ago
One clarification, the full-scale version's max speed is ~75 mph, and typical cruise speeds will be 50-60 mph. The 35 mph number in the article is our subscale prototype. We loose range in a headwind, but on most days the aircraft has more than enough range to complete our target missions. And on the days the weather's too bad to fly, many other small aircraft are grounded too. - Joe from Buoyant

frakkingcylons 5y ago

Their Launch HN thread from 4 days ago has some interesting discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28278515 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28278515

joefigura 5y ago
Thanks for linking! Cool to see this on HN again

not-my-account 5y ago

How would the moving price of Helium affect operations? Or rather, what would the range of Helium prices have to be in order to be profitable? The common trope is that "The world is running out of Helium", yet it seems like that is not actually true [1][2]. I'd be interested to hear how this is all being taken into account. [1] https://physicstoday.scitation.org/do/10.1063/PT.6.2.20200605a/full/ https://physicstoday.scitation.org/do/10.1063/PT.6.2.2020060... [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mOy8Xjaa_o8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mOy8Xjaa_o8

ummonk 5y ago
We aren’t running out of helium in the short-medium term but it’s still definitely a limited resource and there is a legitimate concern about losing access to terrestrial helium once we’ve extracted all we can. Unlike fossil fuels, helium isn’t something we can synthesize from elements that are abundant on Earth.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- User23 5y ago
  Here's hoping we get that fusion reactor problem solved.
elihu 5y ago
In their Q&A thread the other day I believe they said that helium price isn't likely to impact them all that much in the short term. Maybe they'll use hydrogen at some point in the future, but it seems like they don't think it's necessary for their business model to work, given the relatively small size of their airships.

jen20 5y ago

This is a neat idea. I did spend the time while the page loaded wondering "wow, a service mesh to cargo airships is quite the leap" however!

glitchcrab 5y ago
Yeah I had the same confusion when the Launch thread was posted. Choosing company names is hard.
- joefigura 5y ago
  The full company name is "Buoyant Aero" for that reason! We often shorten it to Buoyant, but may use the full name more if it's a recurring point of confusion.

bee_rider 5y ago

Apparently they are getting ~70% of their lift from the buoyancy and ~30% from their propeller. In the video included in the article, they show their prototype flying. It is surprisingly lively for a blimp (I guess owing to the fact that it gets/needs lift from the propeller), darting around in an almost fish-like fashion. I dunno, still skeptical but the video does make it seem much more plausible, at least.

hellbannedguy 5y ago

This has been on here a few days ago. I didn't want to say anything, but have been thinking about the payload. I belive it's 675 lbs. That is not much. A truck can deliver thousands of pounds. (I have weight on my mind because I have to pick up a 800 lb mill, and bring it home in one piece.) It might make sense in Alaska delivering small amounts of material though, but not near power lines.

elihu 5y ago
The idea is they aren't delivering to houses directly, they're moving packages between shipping facilities. So, they can presumably having landing pads on either side that aren't near power lines. 675 pounds isn't much, but if you have a high-priority delivery that's not very heavy it might make a lot of sense. Especially in remote places; they're particularly interested in serving places that are currently served by planes and helicopters, like remote locations in Alaska.
- joefigura 5y ago
  Yup, this is basically it. It's impossible to compete with a truck that's fully loaded, but there are tons of short middle mile trips where trucks aren't fully loaded (LTL or less-than-truckload freight). This type of freight is surprisingly inefficient, particularly in low density areas.
  - crote 5y ago
    It's very easy to compete with a truck in some areas of Alaska: they simply aren't reachable by road! If freight has to be brought in either by boat or by plane, an autonomous blimp suddenly sounds like a great alternative.
    - amelius 5y ago
      Except if the weather conditions force you to delay the shipment.

RcouF1uZ4gsC 5y ago

> Buoyant has built and flown four prototype airships. The most recent sub-scale ship that went to air is 20 feet long, with airspeeds of up to 35 miles per hour and a payload capacity of 10 pounds, but the ultimate aim is to build an airship that’s capable of delivering up to 650 pounds of cargo at a cruise speed of around 60 miles per hour. For depot to depot delivery, how does that compare with an 18 wheeler truck with 30,000 lbs carrying capacity going down the road at 60 miles per hour?

ThatCaio 5y ago
The current design is made to compete with small cargo planes to remote small landlocked cities like many in Alaska with no roads. To be able to compete with trucks they would need a significantly bigger airship as efficiency scales with size.

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thepasswordis 5y ago

Okay I don't get it. In the launch HN, they said their craft is 60 feet long and costs hundreds of thousands of dollars. Doesn't that basically describe a semi truck? Or an airplane? So is the pitch here a way to eliminate the labor costs of trucking by going somewhere that doesn't have much to run into? The typical way that companies like FedEx solve this problem is with an airplane called the Cessna Caravan. It's an awesome plane, it can carry a (figurtive) ton of weight, it's fast, it's reliable, it can land on primitive fields, it has a long range, and it is incredibly well established wrt regulations, and processes.

gpm 5y ago
You'll probably get a better answer from one of the people involved in the project, but I'll take a stab at this. The right comparison is an airplane not a semi-truck. If you can drive a semi somewhere it doesn't seem like this makes much sense. It carries substantially less (it looks like ~1/4 the mass), but it looks like you can buy more than 4 of these for the cost of 1 Cessna Caravan (wikipedia quotes a few million dollars for one of those, and the quote in this thread is a few hundred thousand dollars for an airship). You need 0 pilots to move those 4 around instead of 1 to fly the airplane, and the claim seems to be that it's more fuel efficient per kilogram-meter so those 4 should take less fuel too. Moreover you're getting increased flexibility because if you only need a fraction of the weight, you don't need to send all 4. You also get vtol take-off and landing with the airships.
- joefigura 5y ago
  Yep, this is a pretty accurate. If you have a full truckload of stuff, small air freight cannot compete. But if you're trying to move a single pallet, the airship is the best way to do it. The one thing I'd add is that we deliberately chose 650 lbs to go a size class lower than a Cessna Caravan, because autonomy has enormous benefits for a 650 lb payload aircraft. At that size the pilot alone takes up 1/4 of your payload capacity!
  - lachstar-x 5y ago
    Additionally, operating costs of a semi truck that's going to remote areas are incredibly huge - not only safety equipment, driver pay, but fuel costs as well - that you might be surprised how competitive airships are. Have you looked at the numbers for that? What about building your own lightweight carbon fibre container that is filled and emptied at your location, instead of dropping off the entire package?

davedunkin 5y ago

I thought this was the Buoyant that makes the Linkerd service mesh. "Middle-mile delivery" and "cargo airships" must be new cloud metaphors. I was so confused.

chrisbrandow 5y ago

First question that comes to my mind is, “How much helium will this use if it scales”. Helium is still non-renewable, and it’s still pretty critical for MRIs among other critical analytical instruments. Probably insignificant. But it’s still the question I have.

bombcar 5y ago
Hydrogen can be made safe, and is renewable. For something like this to work we need to move past the Hindenburg.
- nosianu 5y ago
  I think to have once read that World War I fights against Zeppelins showed that igniting the hydrogen proved to actually be quite hard. Only when they were able to open significant holes and used special ammunition did that work. Not enough hydrogen would escape and mix with air and remain in one place to accumulate to cause an explosion. There needed to be a big hole first for enough hydrogen to mix with air, plus the spark to ignite it. That was WWI airplanes over Britain attacking Zeppelins with their machine guns. There were a lot of compartments too, it was not all one giant space of hydrogen. EDIT: I found it mentioned in https://www.military-history.org/feature/german-zeppelins-of-wwi.htm https://www.military-history.org/feature/german-zeppelins-of... > That autumn, the British pilots deployed a new weapon. No longer dependent on dropping bombs or explosive darts over the side, nor on the standard machine-gun ammunition that appeared to have no effect whatever on the giant gas-bags, the home-defence squadrons now filled their ammunition belts with a mixture of tracer and newly-designed explosive and incendiary bullets. The idea was to blow a hole in the fabric of an airship and then ignite the escaping hydrogen as it mixed with air. Of course, once successfully blown open and ignited it would go up in flames like a torch. But it wasn't quite that simple to get to that point.
  - bombcar 5y ago
    It’s lighter than air so the flames burn hot but the gas is going up too - and the ship is losing lift and going down at the same time. It’s a good combination if you have to be on fire. The main key would be a gasbag that’s not flammable.

giantrobot 5y ago

I'm a huge fan of lighter than air craft and have been for many years, decades now. So saying that, I don't see this system ever actually working in the real world. * If the departure and arrival points currently exist, they likely have roads available. Even the best case autonomous airship isn't going to be cheaper than a truck. * With a maximum cargo capacity of 650lbs whatever cargo loaded onto an airship will likely have to be broken down. A standard 48"x48" pallet can easily be loaded with two to three times that weight. * FAA regulations for helicopter landing pads [0] want a final approach, take off (FATO) area to be 1.5x the overall length of a helicopter. For an airship with partially aerodynamic lift I don't see why this wouldn't be larger but if it was the same you'd need a FATO area 90' on a side for a 60' long airship. * The airship terminals would need their infrastructure and operations to include these huge cleared areas for the airships. A lot of consideration would need to go into vertical clearance for things like fork lifts because of the overhang dimensions of the airship. * Urban heat islands and microclimates will severely hamper airships in ways that heavier than air craft don't worry about. While I'm not in love with trucks, they make far more sense than airships for cargo in 99% of all cases. For one trailers and tractors don't need to be handled at the same time. A container(s) can be broken down and pallets moved to trailers and then a tractor called in once that's complete to move it out. They also don't require some huge land area for loading and unloading. Middle mile terminals will have loading docks and/or forklifts. A mechanical problem with a tractor or trailer can be handled relatively easily on-site. If an autonomous airship has an issue at the terminal it can't be towed away easily unless even more space is dedicated to storage. If it breaks down during transport it can land on all sorts of stuff that doesn't want a half ton of airship landing on it. [0] https://www.faa.gov/documentLibrary/media/Advisory_Circular/150_5390_2c.pdf https://www.faa.gov/documentLibrary/media/Advisory_Circular/...

hilbert42 5y ago
I'm a fan of airships too and have been for decades, still I think I have to agree with your points. That said, some people obviously don't including those with money to chuck at the problem. What do you say to this report? https://interestingengineering.com/ufo-russian-cargo-airship https://interestingengineering.com/ufo-russian-cargo-airship With lifting and speed specifications like that it'd be a game-changer if they ever pulled it off. It seems to me if its high proposed speed were ever attained in practice then it'd also be useful for passenger services for continental-sized distances (say 1000 to 2000 miles) where its potentially quick embarking/disembarking would be advantageous over normal air travel. (I bookmarked this url some months ago, I think I may have even gotten it from a HN story.)

clueless123 5y ago

How high can this ships go? How Fast? All along the Andes in south america there is a dire need to efficiently move products from high altitude to the coast (where major cities are) In Peru for example, there are hundreds of small farming towns sitting at 10'000+ feet of altitude but just 40 straight line miles from the ocean.. Today to get there, trucks have to use one of the few roads that ,zig-zag up to the high lands before heading into any of this towns. ( an 8 to 16 hour trip ) Being able to ship produce straight down to the big cities on the coast would be a game changer.

lachstar-x 5y ago
One of the issues with getting that high is that the higher you go, the less buoyancy the airships have, and you'd need bigger ships with more gas to haul the same loads. But the sky is very big, so it might just be an economics of scale problem
- clueless123 5y ago
  In this case, ships will be heavily loaded on the way down (carrying heavy produce) and lightly loaded on the way up (carrying lighter products like medicine or high value manufactured goods)

tlubinski 5y ago

CargoLifter tried that (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CargoLifter https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CargoLifter). Founded in 1996, went public around 2000 followed by insolvency in 2002. Their production hanger is now a tropical holiday resort (https://www.tropical-islands.de/en/ https://www.tropical-islands.de/en/).

mvdwoord 5y ago

Why is this redirecting to https:// https:// guce.advertising.com /collectIdentifiers?sessionId=3_cc-session_a5a373d5-c78.. etc All techcrunch links seem to do this . Even if I Google or go to their domain directly. Blocked by nextdns.

ZeroGravitas 5y ago

Is shooting back up into the air after dropping cargo a problem, or an opportunity? If you need to pick up other cargo then some way to cleverly swap the weight from one to the other could be good, but if it's mostly outgoing weight then that doesn't seem to be an actual problem as long as all the connections let go at the same time.