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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




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