When you’re worth an estimated $41.5 billion, you can easily pay for a massive airship at NASA’s Ames Research Center. But money can’t buy secrecy, Sergey Brin has found.
The Google co-founder’s zeppelin could be a hobby or the genesis of a business, says Bloomberg.com.
“Sorry, I don’t have anything to say about this topic right now,” Brin told Bloomberg in a request for details.
But the business site said: “People familiar with the project said Brin has long been fascinated by airships. His interest in the crafts started when Brin would visit Ames, which is located next to Google parent Alphabet Inc.’s headquarters in Mountain View, California. In the 1930s, Ames was home to the USS Macon, a huge airship built by the U.S. Navy. About three years ago, Brin decided to build one of his own after ogling old photos of the Macon.”
In 2015, Bloomberg noted, Google unit Planetary Ventures took over the large hangars at Ames from NASA and turned them into laboratories for the company.
Alan Weston, former director of programs at NASA Ames, is said to be overseeing Brin’s airship project, “according to people who asked not to be named discussing the secretive plans.” Bloomberg said. “Weston didn’t respond to requests for comment.”
In 2013, Weston told a radio interview of plans for an airship that could be used to haul cargo more fuel efficiently than planes — and straight to their destinations.
“New airship technologies have the promise to reduce the cost of moving things per ton-mile by up to an order of magnitude,” Weston said. “It depends on the size of the airship. A larger airship can reduce costs a lot more than a smaller ship, but there’s design of a class of vehicles that can lift up to 500 tons that could be actually more fuel-efficient than even a truck.”