Interesting that it uses helium. With a helium shortage [1], I'm concerned about the long-term viability of an airship - so I ran some numbers to understand it

Interesting that it uses helium. With a helium shortage [1], I'm concerned about the long-term viability of an airship - so I ran some numbers to understand it better. Helium is used in medical applications for cooling magnets in MRIs - I found the quote "An MRI unit requires approximately 2,000 liters of liquid helium to keep the magnet cool enough to operate." [2] This is interesting to be because, in a helium shortage, healthcare applications probably get high priority. Liquid helium has an expansion ratio of 1:745 [3], so the 2000 liters of liquid helium for an MRI is the equivalent of ~1.5 million liters of helium gas. I can't find the exact volume of helium the Pathfinder 1 requires, but their website says "Pathfinder 1 is 400 feet long and 66 feet wide" [4], which modeled as a cylinder gives a displacement of about ~38 million liters. So, my rough estimate is that an airship needs as much helium as ~25 MRI machines (with a high margin for error). To me, that seems like a lot of helium - I bet society would prefer 25 MRIs to 1 airship. [1] https://www.nbcnews.com/health/health-news/helium-shortage-doctors-are-worried-running-element-threaten-mris-rcna52978 https://www.nbcnews.com/health/health-news/helium-shortage-d... [2] https://www.rsna.org/news/2023/january/helium-shortage-for-mri https://www.rsna.org/news/2023/january/helium-shortage-for-m... [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Expansion_ratio https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Expansion_ratio [4] https://www.ltaresearch.com/faq https://www.ltaresearch.com/faq