From: Patrick Salsbury (salsbury_at_sculptors.com)
Date: 01/08/01
Message-Id: <200101090643.f096hfV25408@bootstrap.sculptors.com> Subject: Re: From Newscientist Date: Mon, 08 Jan 2001 22:43:40 -0800 From: Patrick Salsbury <salsbury_at_sculptors.com>
>
> BIG, BUOYANT AND BACK IN BUSINESS
> Everybody loves airships, and necks still crane at the sight of an
> advertising blimp sailing overhead. But can airships do a bigger
> job,
> carrying cargo, construction gear and even people? Several European
> companies think so, and the future sailing ships of the skies may be
> double-hulled craft that look like airborne catamarans.
> http://www.newscientist.com/features/features.jsp?id=ns227231
>
Excellent article! Thanks for the pointer! (For some reason, that URL
causes the article to appear twice in the page. So while it looks REALLY long,
it's actually only half that long.)
I'd seen the Cargolifter stuff before, but not the pages for Zeppelin
or the ATG SkyCat. Those are quite cool, and it's nice to see several
different companies working towards this end. More competition should ensure
a better chance for survival of the industry.
ATG's website also mentioned having a subsidiary company somewhere
near Silicon Valley. Anyone know more about this? The address they give at
3201 Airpark Drive, Santa Maria, CA seems to be 2-300 miles south of the Bay
Area, near Santa Barbara. (Unless that's what they mean by "near Silicon
Valley"...)
Anyway, thanks again for the link! Lots of good photos on the various
pages, and ATG has a bunch of cool 3D computer models of its ship designs.
Good food for the imagination! :-)
-- Pat