Reading the article, I got the feeling technology hasn’t been the limitation, infrastructure has. It wasn’t surprising that the first picture was at Moffit Fie

Reading the article, I got the feeling technology hasn’t been the limitation, infrastructure has. It wasn’t surprising that the first picture was at Moffit Field. There’s an airship hanger there you can see from the freeway. But what fired my neurons is the mention of Akron, because there is an airship hanger there because that’s where Goodyear was/is headquartered. [1] These are specialized buildings with non-trivial structural requirements…when buildings get that big holding them down is at least as hard as holding them up. Not technically, all it takes is concrete. [2] Physically it takes a lot of concrete and the more efficient the superstructure the more concrete it takes. Cover a skeleton with fabric and you have a very very large sail. This makes staging for humanitarian missions more difficult than ordinary alternatives like a C130. A minimum viable airstrip can be constructed in days (i.e. weeks), an airship hanger will take months (i.e. years). That’s not to say there’s no possible niche in humanitarian missions. Just that it is no more obvious to me than to the article’s author (and presumably it was not clearly delineated by the company to the author). But I am being presumptive and recognize I may well have missed something. [1]: Too lazy to research tire industry consolidation. [2]: and steel to transfer all the uplift and sheer forces to that concrete and more steel to distribute those forces —- and no, Roman concrete doesn’t avoid this…and besides the Tufa makes it less dense and therefore would require more volume even if unreinforced concrete is brittle and therefore terrible in tension and fails catastrophically. But I digress.