This may be an important historical record of the early days of aeronautics, or it may be a vivid fantasy by a lonely, old man.
Either way, it’s beautiful.
The notebooks of Charles A.A. Dellschau were, The Atlantic tells us, rescued from a Texas landfill. They’d been dumped there after a house fire in the 1960s. [...]
It’s the first rigid-body airship since the Hindenburg, says the Register. And the military is banking on Pelican to change the way we fly:
The 230ft-long, 18-ton demonstrator has been built for the US military by radical airship firm Aeros of California, helmed by Ukrainian LTA visionary Igor Pasternak.
…
But the airship can potentially do things that planes can’t: specifically [...]
Oh, yes we did. We’ve already used zeppelins to hunt for aliens (or at least meteorite strikes). And now, MSNBC tells us, we’ve got an odder airship for an odder task:
Using a 45-foot-long, camera-mounted, remote-controlled airship, project founder William Barnes plans to work with a team that includes one scientist to conduct nighttime flyovers of reported Bigfoot hotspots around [...]
When you’re a pioneering aviator, it pays to have a brother who’s an illustrator.
From the Tissandier collection in the Library of Congress, a dream of the sky from the past.
In 1875, Gaston Tissandier flew higher than anyone had ever gone. Two of his companions died from the altitude and he went deaf. [...]
No, McClatchy ain’t making this up. Members of SETI and NASA are using an airship to seek traces of meteorites – and, possibly, alien life:
On Thursday, the scientists flew over the Sierra Nevada foothill region in a chartered zeppelin, hoping to spot craters, burn marks or other signs of falling space particles.
The meteorite did not arrive quietly early [...]
In 1912, aeronautics was a sport.
And the athletes had to start their engines somehow… so Bosch, now known mostly for their spark plugs, made magnetos. And summoned pilot genies to keep those flying machines in the air.
This bit of science art nouveau was found on archive.org. The same issue has a wonderful
Wired’s Danger Room takes a long look at the Blue Devil project – a 370-foot-long airship that, if some legislators have their way, will be flying over Afghanistan soon:
At 370 feet long and 1.4 million cubic feet fat, it is one of the largest blimps built in this country since World War II. All that size allows it [...]
Wired celebrates the anniversary of that very special day, March 14, 1899, when Count Ferdinand Von Zeppelin got the U.S. patent for his design for a hard-bodied balloon with engines and rudders:
Zeppelin, who received a German patent nearly four years earlier, can more accurately be said to have perfected, rather than invented, the cylindrical-shaped craft. His final designs [...]
Discovery is looking up to a way to get satellites into orbit using balloons instead of rockets:
…[T]he now-retired NASA space shuttle was the Hindenburg of the space age. Like the zeppelins, the shuttles were a limited fleet, extremely weather-sensitive, fragile, expensive, required huge ground support crews, and were ultimately retired after two deadly accidents.
In the post-shuttle era, private [...]
Yes, yes, we RSS!
. 
