Friday, March 5, 2010

Next generation blimp that looks like UFO

Eugene Kraizman forwarded me this link:

Russians are about to start building a new type of blimps in the city of Ulyanovsk. The program has been approved and they plan to allocate about 800 jobs for it, investing about 2.7 billion rubles (about $90M). The new blimp will use electric motors to hover around, will generate lift using helium and hot air. It should be able to lift about 600 tons of cargo. Two innovations in design - a special reservoir with heated/cooled air, which would help blimp to land and take off on its own instead of anchoring to towers and saucer-like shape to maintain stability in the air.

http://www.lenta.ru/news/2010/03/03/saucers/

The prototype was successfully demonstrated in 2009 (MAKS). It was about 7 meters (approx 23 feet) in diameter and was able to lift about 20 kilos (approx 44 pounds).

Well, this is a good news indeed. Considering that Brits are working on autonomous blimp already. We can hope to witness Fuller's floating biospheres some day.

Update: the company behind the UFO blimp is LocomoSky.

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