The version I’ve heard is you can eat any wild mushroom you find in the woods and you can eat some of them a second time.
So when will hydrogen dirigibles take off?
I mean, heck, the Hindenburg must have taken off successfully dozens of times and it wasn’t anywhere near the first such aircraft. And like you say, if you can do it even once you can do it again with enough effort!
Or maybe—hear me out—just because you can do something once doesn’t meant it’s bound to be a viable solution to an engineering problem going forward.
Possible is not the same as practical.
I think hydrogen dirigibles could be made perfectly safe today. But the business model for them leaves much to be desired (which isn’t to say they aren’t being tried–there are multiple airship startups today, some of them using hydrogen).
Still, maybe. There was a recent thread where a 557,000 lb transformer had to be moved, blocking off city streets and requiring them to bend stoplights out of the way. A 1 km zeppelin would make short work of that. But there might not be enough loads of that nature to justify the vehicle.
Indeed. And I’d say that if history teaches us anything about things that happen once, it’s that: possible is not the same as practical. It’s going to take a lot more engineering by actual engineers (not Rush-types) to convince me that carbon fiber will be a practical material for manned submersibles operating several kilometers deep, and not just one of history’s “possibles.”
Flying Whales are targeting a market that looks like that. The lifting gas is helium, the power will be hydrogen fuel cells.
I believe they are targeting entry into service for 2028 or so.
No, it just is a reflecttion that the market is extremely small–and it is very rare to write up ASM or SAE standards for extremely small markets.
I csn see how it would be unlikely to have an “industry standard” for something that is essentially custom experimental one-offs like this.
Fair point!
Except there seems to be standards for metal deep-sea submersibles. That was one of the points that came out early in the disaster: experts in the area of submersibles said that they were predicting an epic fail, because he wasn’t going through the rigorous testing that they used for metal submersibles. It may be a small market, but there’s apparently well-developed standards. You would think that the developer of a new vessel would run tests already developed for deep-sea submersibles, especially for a new and innovative design.
Of course, you would be wrong in that expectation for Stockton Rush.
I feel like you’re conflating a couple definitions of “practical”. An engineered thing can be practical in the sense that it serves a useful purpose and works as designed. But then there’s another level of practical which is really just “cost-effective enough to close the business case”.
Lots of things succeed at the first but fail the second. Most small-payload rockets. The Airbus A380. Modern zeppelins, probably. And, I suspect, any sub design, CF or not, intended to shuttle passengers to the Titanic. There is just no intersection point between the market size and the cost to run such a sub.