One of these efforts graced the Berlin, Germany area with a huge hangar: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CargoLifter

Luckily, they found a new use for the structure: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tropical_Islands_Resort

This seems like a project for Elon Musk

Awesome use for that structure.

The Zeppelin this article talks about could still only potentially lift 66 tonnes, less than a third of the weight of this spectrometer. But yeah, a zeppelin with sufficient lift would be a very good solution to this problem.

edit yes, "over the long term" they say they could build an airship with a 500 tons lift capability, but that seems far away.

Look at the size of the hangar: (people for scale)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CargoLifter#mediaviewer/File:Br...

All this for an unsucessful zeppelin that could carry less than the required 200 tons. You'll be convinced very quickly that it doesn't trump simply carrying by land.

my first thought as well. The CL160, a Starrluftschiff (rigid airship?) alias Zeppelin, was planned to lift 160t.

I wished there would one fly over me from time to time.

Would high helium prices prevent this nowadays?

My first thought was why not just evacuate it, given that it's a vacuum vessel? It doesn't work though. Making some gross assumptions about its dimensions, its buoyancy when empty would be the weight of a few tons. Not enough to lift itself!

You'd have to use hydrogen. It's more dangerous of course, but it should be doable.