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Do we even have enough helium to support a huge fleet of airships?

• Qem 3y ago
  It's possible to use hydrogen to save helium, while keeping it safe. Even the designers of Hindenburg in the 1930s had in mind a design involving hydrogen enveloped by an outer helium layer to make it inert. But a total ban in US helium exports foiled their plans, leading to risky full hydrogen utilization. See <https://www.airships.net/hindenburg/hindenburg-design-technology/ https://www.airships.net/hindenburg/hindenburg-design-techno...>: "But Hindenburg’s potentially most innovative features were never actually implemented. Hindenburg was originally designed for helium, which was too difficult to obtain and too expensive to be vented to compensate for the weight of fuel burned during flight. To avoid the need to valve helium, several innovative solutions were proposed. One involved a set of inner hydrogen gas cells to be installed at center of 14 of the ship’s 16 helium cells. The flammable hydrogen would be protected inside the larger cell containing inert helium, and when it was necessary to valve lifting gas, hydrogen, rather than helium, could be released. When it became obvious that helium would not be made available by the Americans, and that the ship would be inflated with hydrogen, the inner cells were abandoned, but Hindenburg did retain the axial catwalk at the center of the ship that was installed to provide access to the valves for these inner cells."