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