It’s longer than three Boeing 737s. Someday it could carry up to five tons of cargo and float from San Francisco to Chicago.
Long hidden in a dark hangar at Moffett Field, the remarkable Pathfinder 1 — a gigantic white cigar-shaped airship — was rolled out into the bright Bay Area sunshine for some quick exercise last week, then rolled back in.
The behemoth aircraft, the brainchild of Google co-founder Sergey Brin and aviation innovator Alan Weston, behaved exactly as intended.
It didn’t float, because it was securely tethered by ropes held by ground crew. That’s planned for next time, probably within several weeks. Its initial maneuvers will be around Moffett Field, which Google leases from NASA Ames. Over the next year, it will fly several FAA-approved missions at an altitude below 1500 feet over the waters of the South Bay, including the Dumbarton Bridge.
But, as hoped, Pathfinder “superheated” when its skin was warmed by the sun, causing it to expand and lighten. When propelled by small electric motors, it swung one direction, then another.
“It performed really well,” said Weston, chief executive officer of maker LTA Research and former director of programs at NASA’s Ames Research Center, where he led more than 50 spacecraft, rocket, interceptor and air vehicle missions that revolutionized space science.
The Pathfinder is not a blimp, like the familiar balloons that drift over football stadiums. Blimps have no internal structure so can lose their shape, and deflate. The Pathfinder is an dirigible, with a rigid framework of 10,000 carbon-fiber reinforced tubes and 3,000 titanium hubs to form a protective skeleton around the gas cells, surrounded by a lightweight synthetic Tedlar skin.
The airship is about 400 feet long. By comparison, the traditional Goodyear blimp is 250 feet long.
Pathfinder 1 will be the largest aircraft to take to the skies since the ill-fated Hindenburg dirigible of the 1930s, a major air disaster that was…
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