Re:Solar powered airships
by andor on Sunday October 23, 2011 @03:56PM
(#3147075)
The German company Cargolifter AG [0] was set up to develop a large airship with a freight capacity of 160 tons. This is a lot, 10 tons more than the freight version of the Airbus A380. The hangar they built for it is one of the largest buildings in the world and houses a water park.
They went bankrupt during development. I've heard that they couldn't find a solution for controlling the buoyancy, which is critical when you need to drop 100+ tons of cargo and don't want your airship to lift off into space. There's a video on Youtube in which they use water to control buoyancy of a smaller balloon [1].
They went bankrupt during development. I've heard that they couldn't find a solution for controlling the buoyancy, which is critical when you need to drop 100+ tons of cargo and don't want your airship to lift off into space. There's a video on Youtube in which they use water to control buoyancy of a smaller balloon [1].
[0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cargolifter [1] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lralh-LwcJQ