Hindenburg 2.0?
- 82newsbulletin
- Sep 29, 2020
- 2 min read
Written by Nicolas Guignard
The first humans to ever fly were the Montgolfier brothers, who in 1783, in their aerostat filled with hydrogen revolutionized transportation. The technical principle at work is easy to understand: fill an envelope with gas – helium (nowadays) or hydrogen (before WW2) – that you heat up with a burner. Once heated, the gas is less dense, and the balloon rises into the skies.
Up until the second world war, balloons and especially airships were highly popular. They had a longer autonomy than planes, required little space to take off, and could carry more merchandise or passengers. However, they were supplanted by planes for two main reasons: storing the gas is especially complicated and expensive, and hydrogen filled ones are highly dangerous. Indeed, hydrogen is very flammable and on the 6th of May 1937, the Zeppelin Hindenburg burst into flames as it landed in Lakehurst, New Jersey. The accident was highly mediatised, and WW2 would see the invention of the jet engine and foster rapid progress in airplanes conception, all of which would restrict the use of hot air balloons to very specific roles (such as weather balloons).
However, recent advancement in material engineering might have the highly unexpected effect of propelling airships back under the spotlight. By using very light yet impermeable and resistant material (mainly mixes between aluminium and ceramic, carbon fibres or aerogel), researchers are on the way to use a vacuum as the gas that will lift the structure upwards.
Finding the appropriate material is highly challenging however, since it has to withstand the pressure of the surrounding air without collapsing while being sufficiently light for the vacuum to still lift the structure.
This kind of vehicle would be both environmentally friendly and much cheaper than current helium balloons. Benjamin Jenett, an MIT and NASA employee dreams even bigger: since the atmosphere on Mars is less dense than on earth, vacuum airships would be much easier to manage there, and could be an easy way to transport much needed material from the surface to an orbital station.
A few years are still necessary before vacuum airships begin to be available to the general public. In the meantime, several companies such as Ocean Sky or Flying Whale are developing new kinds of helium airships for cruises over the poles.
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