Cargo airships are happening

“Once you account for all these delays and costs, the 4 to 5 days it takes to cross the Pacific on an airship starts to look pretty good. If you can pick up goods directly from a customer on one side and deliver them directly to a customer on the other, you can actually beat today’s air freight service on delivery time. This changes everything. Since airships are, after all, competitive with 747s on delivery time, you can earn the full revenue associated with air freight, not just the lower trucking rates I had assumed. Cargo airship margins, therefore, can be much higher than I had realized. Today’s 747 freighters have almost no margin. They operate in an almost perfectly competitive market and are highly sensitive to fuel costs. They simply won’t be able to compete with transpacific airships that are faster end to end, less subject to volatile fuel prices, and operating with cushy margins. A cargo airship designed to compete head to head in the air freight market could take the lion’s share of the revenue in the air cargo market while being highly profitable.” (Eli Dourado)

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SpaceX’s mega rocket booster returning to the launch pad to be captured during a test flight. SpaceX achieved a historic engineering feat when its massive Starship rocket booster successfully returned to and was caught by mechanical arms (dubbed “chopsticks”) at its launch pad in Texas, seven minutes after liftoff. The 232-foot stainless steel booster was gripped and held above ground by the launch tower’s arms, marking the first time SpaceX has recovered a Starship booster at the launch pad itself – a significant advancement in their goal of making rockets reusable and enabling future missions to the Moon and Mars. (via The Associated Press / SpaceX)

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