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A comment on The Increasing Scarcity of Helium.

Re:The Increasing Scarcity of Helium by Animats on Wednesday June 17, 2015 @05:45PM (#9735511)
The price of helium in bulk went way up two years ago. Airship Ventures, Silicon Valley's tourist Zeppelin NT, had to shut down and sell their ship.
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Re:The Increasing Scarcity of Helium by GigabyteCoin on Thursday June 18, 2015 @12:52AM (#9736903)
According to wikipedia, they closed up due to lack of a long term sponsor. [0]

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Airship_Ventures

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Re:The Increasing Scarcity of Helium by Animats on Thursday June 18, 2015 @02:00AM (#9737054)
It's more like the helium shortage made the existing operation unprofitable, and they needed to increase revenue to stay in operation. Also, during the recession, $400 sightseeing trips didn't sell well.

Airships leak helium. A lot. You can't just inflate the thing once; it needs constant refilling. I met the CEO once at a steampunk convention, before the shutdown. The price of helium was starting to hurt, but hadn't killed them yet. Their two biggest expenses were labor and helium. Fuel cost was relatively small.

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