Buoyant wants to solve middle-mile delivery with cargo airships | Hacker News Reader

Buoyant wants to solve middle-mile delivery with cargo airships

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68 pointslxm70 comments

How high can this ships go? How Fast?

All along the Andes in south america there is a dire need to efficiently move products from high altitude to the coast (where major cities are)

In Peru for example, there are hundreds of small farming towns sitting at 10'000+ feet of altitude but just 40 straight line miles from the ocean.. Today to get there, trucks have to use one of the few roads that ,zig-zag up to the high lands before heading into any of this towns. ( an 8 to 16 hour trip )

Being able to ship produce straight down to the big cities on the coast would be a game changer.

One of the issues with getting that high is that the higher you go, the less buoyancy the airships have, and you'd need bigger ships with more gas to haul the same loads. But the sky is very big, so it might just be an economics of scale problem

In this case, ships will be heavily loaded on the way down (carrying heavy produce) and lightly loaded on the way up (carrying lighter products like medicine or high value manufactured goods)

Their Launch HN thread from 4 days ago has some interesting discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28278515

Thanks for linking! Cool to see this on HN again

First question that comes to my mind is, “How much helium will this use if it scales”. Helium is still non-renewable, and it’s still pretty critical for MRIs among other critical analytical instruments.

Probably insignificant. But it’s still the question I have.

Hydrogen can be made safe, and is renewable. For something like this to work we need to move past the Hindenburg.

I think to have once read that World War I fights against Zeppelins showed that igniting the hydrogen proved to actually be quite hard. Only when they were able to open significant holes and used special ammunition did that work. Not enough hydrogen would escape and mix with air and remain in one place to accumulate to cause an explosion. There needed to be a big hole first for enough hydrogen to mix with air, plus the spark to ignite it.

That was WWI airplanes over Britain attacking Zeppelins with their machine guns.

There were a lot of compartments too, it was not all one giant space of hydrogen.

EDIT: I found it mentioned in https://www.military-history.org/feature/german-zeppelins-of...

> That autumn, the British pilots deployed a new weapon. No longer dependent on dropping bombs or explosive darts over the side, nor on the standard machine-gun ammunition that appeared to have no effect whatever on the giant gas-bags, the home-defence squadrons now filled their ammunition belts with a mixture of tracer and newly-designed explosive and incendiary bullets. The idea was to blow a hole in the fabric of an airship and then ignite the escaping hydrogen as it mixed with air.

Of course, once successfully blown open and ignited it would go up in flames like a torch. But it wasn't quite that simple to get to that point.

It’s lighter than air so the flames burn hot but the gas is going up too - and the ship is losing lift and going down at the same time. It’s a good combination if you have to be on fire.

The main key would be a gasbag that’s not flammable.

>...the ship is losing lift and going down at the same time. It’s a good combination if you have to be on fire.

Personally, I'd rather not be falling out of the sky while I'm on fire.

I would, depending on rate of descend... Falling out of sky faster and not being on fire might be worse.

> "Hydrogen can be made"

Piggy-backing on your comment at a tangent - how did they make such large quantities of Hydrogen in the early 1900s (and store and transport it safely)? This[1] has some interesting reading on it; there were gas cylinders but no standardisation of valves, not good lubricants for compressors, a different set of pipes for airship filling and airship topping-up, some stations which could remove and re-purify the Hydrogen, and two different methods of pre-war and post-war production are described.

This[2] has much more detailed history of the options, including a Popular Mechanics article from 1908.

[1] https://www.nevilshute.org/Engineering/AMBurgess/amb_hydroge...

[2] https://welweb.org/ThenandNow/Hydrogen%20Generation.html

It’s interesting that the answer everyone gives is the least effective and efficient way - electrolysis.

Sulfuric acid and iron into hydrogen is much simpler.

Efficient I can believe, but I’m curious why that’s simpler than electrolysis? I first played with electrolysis when I was nine.

It's simple but surprisingly fickle, even more if you want industrial amounts of hydrogen safely. This is an example of a home setup and nontrivial considerations that went into it:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d85OX6yEwE0

Depends on your metric. Sulfuric acid and iron is pretty simple if you don't count the blast furnace. Certainly a lot simpler than a gasoline generator. If you have grid power and a diode, electrolysis gets simpler --- though you probably want at least a transformer. Hydrolith is probably simpler and lighter than sulfuric acid and iron, though.

"Hydrogen can be made safe, and is renewable. For something like this to work we need to move past the Hindenburg."

Seems to me you're right. In some ways it's a damn shame that reporters and movie cameras were at Lakehurst that fateful day, unfortunately their presence set back airship development at least a half century.

The WWI matter that nosianu has raised about how hard it was to bring down hydrogen-filled airships due to the difficulty of igniting the hydrogen is well known and it ought to be a starting point for its reintroduction. New containment materials combined with what we've learned from the Hindenburg should also do the trick. On a regulatory point, if you kept hydrogen to cargo-only airships and where possible even routed them around heavily populated areas (at least until well proven) we could see hydrogen make a comeback.

Also, Hydrogen has that other advantage, it has about 8% more lift than helium. It occurred to me hydrogen's risk could be further mitigated if it were used in combination with helium where they shared the lifting - the hydrogen able of being vented, etc. and the helium bagged separately as permanent/primary buoyancy. Reckon that with a fresh look we've many new options to explore.

I've heard that aerogel [0] is an alternative. Don't know enough details to elaborate. I guess it's way more expensive than helium, at least for now.

[0]: https://www.nasa.gov/topics/technology/features/aerogels.htm...

Can a physicist help me understand something here? Assuming each of these can carry ~650lbs at 30mph. They're 60feet long and have a VERY lightweight airframe. How would these craft deal with wind? do they just get blown away every time there is a gust?

Wind will never not be a problem for airships. At best, modern weather radars and forecasting might allow airships to avoid storms better than their early 20th century counterparts did.

Incidentally, a lot of casual airship fans pin hopes on helium instead of hydrogen to keep airships safe. But the deadliest airship disaster in history was a helium airship, the USS Akron, which was destroyed by bad weather killing 73 of the 76 aboard.

>the deadliest airship disaster in history was a helium airship

I think that may be a misleading way to put it.

"Most casualties had been caused by drowning and hypothermia, since the crew had not been issued life jackets, and there had not been time to deploy the single life raft"

When a large airplane enters heavy turbulence, stalls and falls into the sea, I don't think that would be the usual scenario.

I don't think that is misleading; a storm downed the airship, resulting in nearly all the crew dying. That they didn't die on impact doesn't change things. If a torpedo sank a ship and most of the crew died from exposure in the water rather than the explosion (USS Indianapolis), you'd not say that torpedoes aren't a major threat to ships.

Regardless, if you don't like that example, pick from the list: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_airship_accidents

Another comment elsewhere in this discussion says that airships stalled for fear of another Hindenberg. 'Fear' suggests some measure of irrationality, as though the Hindenberg were a one-off accident. The reality is these things were crashing all the time. People had ample reason to rationally expect airships would continue to crash.

> "might allow airships to avoid storms better than their early 20th century counterparts did"

Not sure they wanted to; from [1]: "To maintain altitude, Hindenburg would brush against clouds and collect rainwater in gutters that fed the ballast tanks. If we passed through a shower every few hours there was no need to release gas. There were occasions when no rain was available, but we were rarely far from a suitable shower."

[1] https://www.airspacemag.com/history-of-flight/crossing-atlan...

That is the coolest thing. Reminds me of cloudscoops mining He3 from gas giants in science fiction books

> "But the deadliest airship disaster in history was a helium airship, the USS Akron, which was destroyed by bad weather killing 73 of the 76 aboard."

Worse than that in fate's sense of irony, after the Hindenburg disaster the US authorities banned Hydrogen as a lifting gas and built the USS Shenandoah as a Helium airship. When a Hydrogen airship of that era flew too high it had valves at the top to vent Hydrogen to the atmosphere and reduce buoyancy, but Helium was 50x-100x more expensive and the Sheandoah had its valves sealed so the crew couldn't waste any of it. It hit a turbulent updraft, rose so high the gas pressure in the balloons was past spec, and this is suspected to have contributed to it breaking up and crashing, killing 14 people.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USS_Shenandoah_%28ZR-1%29#Cras...

Wind is generally able to be forecast fairly well today. Applications sensitive to wind, especially to gusts, as light weight large side area vehicles will be, are going to be not usable when it's gusty. But that doesn't mean they're going to be not usable often enough to not be cost effective, and there may be options suitable to the specific mission to, for example, deliver a package simply nearby instead of at the destination.

There's also other design shapes, one of which I'm a little familiar with being Skylifter, that is saucer shaped. Their target audience is heavy lift, but they were very intent on minimizing wind effects and so chose that shape.

This specific shape though will be suitable a lot of the time for a lot of missions, and may even be more cost effective than a different shape - my non-CFD'd thought here is that the long skinny shape will likely get more lift from flow than a saucer. Maybe someone has done that research, as I'd love to read through it.

There’s a video of their 3 metre diameter prototype here: https://phys.org/news/2010-10-skylifter-airship-day-video.ht...

They responded to my question about this here:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28278849

That... doesn't give me much optimism. They were asked about wind but they answered the question they wish they'd been asked (fog).

They were asked variations of the same question several times. Here's one of the more informative responses: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28278843

The top speed can be taken as simply relative to a constant wind speed. Say they have a max speed of 30mph heading against the wind at 25mph. The net will simply be 5mph aka super slow.

Gusty wind is more complex as it depends on cumulative drag factor. You can estimate their forward drag by knowledge about the motors they are using (energy -> drag work).

Likely, unless their motors are tiny, the even the forward drag is quite high. This is why their max speed is not something like 300km/h.

TLDR: its just like airplanes only much worse

One clarification, the full-scale version's max speed is ~75 mph, and typical cruise speeds will be 50-60 mph. The 35 mph number in the article is our subscale prototype. We loose range in a headwind, but on most days the aircraft has more than enough range to complete our target missions. And on the days the weather's too bad to fly, many other small aircraft are grounded too. - Joe from Buoyant

This has been on here a few days ago.

I didn't want to say anything, but have been thinking about the payload. I belive it's 675 lbs.

That is not much. A truck can deliver thousands of pounds. (I have weight on my mind because I have to pick up a 800 lb mill, and bring it home in one piece.)

It might make sense in Alaska delivering small amounts of material though, but not near power lines.

The idea is they aren't delivering to houses directly, they're moving packages between shipping facilities. So, they can presumably having landing pads on either side that aren't near power lines.

675 pounds isn't much, but if you have a high-priority delivery that's not very heavy it might make a lot of sense. Especially in remote places; they're particularly interested in serving places that are currently served by planes and helicopters, like remote locations in Alaska.

Yup, this is basically it. It's impossible to compete with a truck that's fully loaded, but there are tons of short middle mile trips where trucks aren't fully loaded (LTL or less-than-truckload freight). This type of freight is surprisingly inefficient, particularly in low density areas.

It's very easy to compete with a truck in some areas of Alaska: they simply aren't reachable by road!

If freight has to be brought in either by boat or by plane, an autonomous blimp suddenly sounds like a great alternative.

Except if the weather conditions force you to delay the shipment.

...which can happen with planes and boats too.

Here's their take on the inherent tradeoffs of various transportation options in inclement weather:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28278843

I wonder how much the airship itself will cost at scale. Since their plan is to be autonomous, and energy costs will be low, it seems the economics of this depend on the cost of the airship and maintenance.

Put differently, if they’re cheap enough you could just buy 100 and ship 67,500 lbs a day.

Or to be put evem more differently, 100 airships could ship less than 2 40-foot shipping containers. (At least according to https://www.technogroupusa.com/size-and-weight-limit-laws/ , though I suspect density would be the limiting factor.)

Your link says a 40' container weighs 20,000kg. The Hindenburg alone could lift 232,000kg [1].

Bouyant needs to go bigger.

[1] https://erik-engheim.medium.com/calculating-lifting-capacity...

No. It had 232 tons of bouyancy. Most of that was taken up by its own mass. The amount it could lift, its payload, was a tiny fraction of that amount. Wikipedia says it could lift aprox 10,000kg. Roughly the 5% payload ratio of a typical space launch today.

A FH can put 63,000kg to low Earth orbit. A delta 4 heavy 28,000.

Not sure where your 200,000kg “typical” comes from, even Saturn V, SLS and Starship aren’t 200t.

For those wondering:

Starship is "promissing" 100t [1] but targeting 150t reusable and 250t expendable [2], Saturn V was 140t [3], SLS 95 (block 1)/135 (block2) tons [4].

It's not clear we will ever see starship launch without an attempt to recover the booster stage, but at least in theory it's a 200t size vehicle.

[1] https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1423677217133957127

[2] https://www.spacex.com/media/starship_users_guide_v1.pdf

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saturn_V

[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Launch_System

Ratio. Payload to orbit is about 5% of launch mass.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Payload_fraction

What did you mean about not near power lines? As in a safety thing, or that where there a powerline then theres some better option for transport? Like a cargo size hyperloop runing along the powerlines?

CargoLifter tried that (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CargoLifter). Founded in 1996, went public around 2000 followed by insolvency in 2002. Their production hanger is now a tropical holiday resort (https://www.tropical-islands.de/en/).

How would the moving price of Helium affect operations? Or rather, what would the range of Helium prices have to be in order to be profitable?

The common trope is that "The world is running out of Helium", yet it seems like that is not actually true [1][2]. I'd be interested to hear how this is all being taken into account.

[1] https://physicstoday.scitation.org/do/10.1063/PT.6.2.2020060... [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mOy8Xjaa_o8

We aren’t running out of helium in the short-medium term but it’s still definitely a limited resource and there is a legitimate concern about losing access to terrestrial helium once we’ve extracted all we can. Unlike fossil fuels, helium isn’t something we can synthesize from elements that are abundant on Earth.

Here's hoping we get that fusion reactor problem solved.

In their Q&A thread the other day I believe they said that helium price isn't likely to impact them all that much in the short term. Maybe they'll use hydrogen at some point in the future, but it seems like they don't think it's necessary for their business model to work, given the relatively small size of their airships.

Okay I don't get it. In the launch HN, they said their craft is 60 feet long and costs hundreds of thousands of dollars.

Doesn't that basically describe a semi truck? Or an airplane?

So is the pitch here a way to eliminate the labor costs of trucking by going somewhere that doesn't have much to run into?

The typical way that companies like FedEx solve this problem is with an airplane called the Cessna Caravan. It's an awesome plane, it can carry a (figurtive) ton of weight, it's fast, it's reliable, it can land on primitive fields, it has a long range, and it is incredibly well established wrt regulations, and processes.

You'll probably get a better answer from one of the people involved in the project, but I'll take a stab at this.

The right comparison is an airplane not a semi-truck. If you can drive a semi somewhere it doesn't seem like this makes much sense.

It carries substantially less (it looks like ~1/4 the mass), but it looks like you can buy more than 4 of these for the cost of 1 Cessna Caravan (wikipedia quotes a few million dollars for one of those, and the quote in this thread is a few hundred thousand dollars for an airship). You need 0 pilots to move those 4 around instead of 1 to fly the airplane, and the claim seems to be that it's more fuel efficient per kilogram-meter so those 4 should take less fuel too. Moreover you're getting increased flexibility because if you only need a fraction of the weight, you don't need to send all 4. You also get vtol take-off and landing with the airships.

Yep, this is a pretty accurate. If you have a full truckload of stuff, small air freight cannot compete. But if you're trying to move a single pallet, the airship is the best way to do it.

The one thing I'd add is that we deliberately chose 650 lbs to go a size class lower than a Cessna Caravan, because autonomy has enormous benefits for a 650 lb payload aircraft. At that size the pilot alone takes up 1/4 of your payload capacity!

Additionally, operating costs of a semi truck that's going to remote areas are incredibly huge - not only safety equipment, driver pay, but fuel costs as well - that you might be surprised how competitive airships are. Have you looked at the numbers for that? What about building your own lightweight carbon fibre container that is filled and emptied at your location, instead of dropping off the entire package?

Resupply to mountain tops that would require a helicopter.

>airplane called the Cessna Caravan. It's an awesome plane, it can carry a (figurtive) ton of weight, it's fast, it's reliable, it can land on primitive fields, it has a long range, and it is incredibly well established wrt regulations, and processes.

that reminded - for the last 70+ years all over USSR/Russia that role has been carried out by this plane https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antonov_An-2 . They have been trying to modernize/replace it, and any good deep modernization or replacement project of it ends up along the lines of Cessna Caravan, though no deep modernization/replacement has succeeded yet because it is very hard to beat that combination of price, simplicity, ruggedness and utility. And i have hard time imagining what can successfully replace it in general. May be a range of smaller autonomous VTOL UAVs for much smaller payloads can take a bit of market from it. For passengers though nothing comes to mind, at least until electric planes get similar range and carrying capacity. I don't see blimps taking any of such a role though.

> Buoyant has built and flown four prototype airships. The most recent sub-scale ship that went to air is 20 feet long, with airspeeds of up to 35 miles per hour and a payload capacity of 10 pounds, but the ultimate aim is to build an airship that’s capable of delivering up to 650 pounds of cargo at a cruise speed of around 60 miles per hour.

For depot to depot delivery, how does that compare with an 18 wheeler truck with 30,000 lbs carrying capacity going down the road at 60 miles per hour?

The current design is made to compete with small cargo planes to remote small landlocked cities like many in Alaska with no roads.

To be able to compete with trucks they would need a significantly bigger airship as efficiency scales with size.

I'm a huge fan of lighter than air craft and have been for many years, decades now. So saying that, I don't see this system ever actually working in the real world.

* If the departure and arrival points currently exist, they likely have roads available. Even the best case autonomous airship isn't going to be cheaper than a truck.

* With a maximum cargo capacity of 650lbs whatever cargo loaded onto an airship will likely have to be broken down. A standard 48"x48" pallet can easily be loaded with two to three times that weight.

* FAA regulations for helicopter landing pads [0] want a final approach, take off (FATO) area to be 1.5x the overall length of a helicopter. For an airship with partially aerodynamic lift I don't see why this wouldn't be larger but if it was the same you'd need a FATO area 90' on a side for a 60' long airship.

* The airship terminals would need their infrastructure and operations to include these huge cleared areas for the airships. A lot of consideration would need to go into vertical clearance for things like fork lifts because of the overhang dimensions of the airship.

* Urban heat islands and microclimates will severely hamper airships in ways that heavier than air craft don't worry about.

While I'm not in love with trucks, they make far more sense than airships for cargo in 99% of all cases. For one trailers and tractors don't need to be handled at the same time. A container(s) can be broken down and pallets moved to trailers and then a tractor called in once that's complete to move it out.

They also don't require some huge land area for loading and unloading. Middle mile terminals will have loading docks and/or forklifts. A mechanical problem with a tractor or trailer can be handled relatively easily on-site. If an autonomous airship has an issue at the terminal it can't be towed away easily unless even more space is dedicated to storage. If it breaks down during transport it can land on all sorts of stuff that doesn't want a half ton of airship landing on it.

[0] https://www.faa.gov/documentLibrary/media/Advisory_Circular/...

I'm a fan of airships too and have been for decades, still I think I have to agree with your points. That said, some people obviously don't including those with money to chuck at the problem. What do you say to this report?

https://interestingengineering.com/ufo-russian-cargo-airship

With lifting and speed specifications like that it'd be a game-changer if they ever pulled it off. It seems to me if its high proposed speed were ever attained in practice then it'd also be useful for passenger services for continental-sized distances (say 1000 to 2000 miles) where its potentially quick embarking/disembarking would be advantageous over normal air travel.

(I bookmarked this url some months ago, I think I may have even gotten it from a HN story.)

I'm extremely skeptical about that proposal. The sky crane is a nice idea on paper but in practice I don't think it will work. A fully loaded 20' shipping container can mass thirty tons (US). Even a light wind could turn a container on the airship's crane into a giant building destroying flail. There's also issues with static discharge that could be extremely hazardous and difficult to work around. Suggesting the airship will just use its crane to lift containers without extra infrastructure is really fantastical.

Then there's the fantastic promises of payload and speed. Even with their combination of hot air and helium for lift they would have to be ridiculously large to lift the proposed payloads. Until they've got an actual working full sized model I just don't believe their numbers. The Hidenberg was stupendously large and only had a payload of about ten tons using hydrogen, that's not even a single fully loaded 20' shipping container.

I love this idea. Airships development stalled over the fear of another Hindenbuerg. Buoyant could be a good alternative for this sort of transportation need.

Apparently they are getting ~70% of their lift from the buoyancy and ~30% from their propeller.

In the video included in the article, they show their prototype flying. It is surprisingly lively for a blimp (I guess owing to the fact that it gets/needs lift from the propeller), darting around in an almost fish-like fashion. I dunno, still skeptical but the video does make it seem much more plausible, at least.

Is shooting back up into the air after dropping cargo a problem, or an opportunity?

If you need to pick up other cargo then some way to cleverly swap the weight from one to the other could be good, but if it's mostly outgoing weight then that doesn't seem to be an actual problem as long as all the connections let go at the same time.

Why is this redirecting to https:// guce.advertising.com /collectIdentifiers?sessionId=3_cc-session_a5a373d5-c78.. etc

All techcrunch links seem to do this . Even if I Google or go to their domain directly.

Blocked by nextdns.

This is a neat idea. I did spend the time while the page loaded wondering "wow, a service mesh to cargo airships is quite the leap" however!

Yeah I had the same confusion when the Launch thread was posted. Choosing company names is hard.

The full company name is "Buoyant Aero" for that reason! We often shorten it to Buoyant, but may use the full name more if it's a recurring point of confusion.

I thought this was the Buoyant that makes the Linkerd service mesh. "Middle-mile delivery" and "cargo airships" must be new cloud metaphors. I was so confused.

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