Welcome to Airsteading *pinned post*

05.2016 In the last month I came across a few people in the Seasteading community that were also dreaming the dream of Airsteading. In case you are new to both: Seasteading is the idea that people should be allowed to build new nations in international waters to be able to design new constitutions, laws, and societies. While Seasteaders follow the approach to conquer the high seas which is almost the only spot on planet Earth that is fairly easily habitable and not yet taken.
Airsteaders instead believe that new advances in the airship industry could enable us to permanently live up in the air on zeppelins or balloons. After all, there were airships 80 years ago that could carry 72 passengers plus crew around the globe while offering a spacious and luxurious travel experience that cannot be found in any first-class airplane today.
Other than that airships could be an interesting alternative to cruise ships and yachts offering an incredible view and more flexibility.

I plan to publish some news on airships, Airsteading, but also the political thoughts surrounding both air- and Seasteading here. Posts after this one are sorted latest to oldest, so if you are new, I encourage you to start from the bottom.

Since this blog is already among the top Google search results (suggesting that the majority has not yet discovered this topic for themselves), I would like to connect the few who do in fact think about Airsteading.

Just drop me a message at airsteading.blog@gmail.com :)

Update 26.07.2020

All my Airsteading related posts will be moved to my medium publication on the topic (https://medium.com/airsteading)

Sergey Brin seems to be into this as well

While all eyes are currently on the flying car and flying motorbike ambitions of Google co-founder Larry Page, information has spread, that Sergey Brin is working on an airship (https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-04-25/with-secret-airship-sergey-brin-also-wants-to-fly). He seems to even have it built in the historic Hangar One of the USS Macon. Together with its sister airship, the USS Macon was the only flying aircraft carrier ever built.

USS Macon in front of Hangar One, California, 1934

Seeing Sergey Brin - and the financial power he possesses - enter the airship industry is exciting. Despite this, it is yet to be found out what the purpose and the size of these zeppelins will be. According to the Bloomberg article, it is also unclear if Brin regards the project more as a hobby or a business opportunity. Likely it will be a combination of the two. Possible clients could be transportation companies and those who need to bring heavy equipment into hard-to-access places like the mountainous or little-populated areas.

After some research, I also found out that the Google subsidiary Planetary Ventures has leased Hangar One and the adjunct Moffett airfield for 60 years for $ 1.16 billion (https://www.nasa.gov/press/2014/november/nasa-signs-lease-with-planetary-ventures-llc-for-use-of-moffett-airfield-and/).

My conclusion though is, that if he was building an airship that will come close to or exceed the biggest ones from the first half of the last century, then there'd be more information - and more interest. Also, he'd have to invest most of his time or at least money, in it. The fact that he seems to not be doing this on his own but rather with Planetary Ventures and thus Google, gives hope, that maybe there is more money behind this news than we might assume now.

Hangar One, 1999

A brief introduction

Dear Airsteader,

until I have found the time to concentrate knowledge about Airsteading in this blog feel free to learn more about this exciting topic:

This is the Wikipedia article about the largest airship ever built:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LZ_129_Hindenburg

This is the Wikipedia article about the only "flying aircraft carrier". The US military airship USS Akron had four Sparrowhawk fighter planes aboard that could be dropped mid-flight. To land on the mothership, they were equipped with a hook.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USS_Akron_%28ZRS-4%29

Here is an article about the now-defunct CargoLifter Inc., one of the few undertakings to revive the airship industry in the past 20 years. Founded in 1996 they worked on a heavy lifting airship but until bankruptcy in 2002, they only developed a balloon that is able to lift 60 tons.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CargoLifter

I hope the links above can provide an introduction to Airsteading and airships. I will add some articles of my own soon to condense the existing knowledge about airships to give an exhausting overview of what is going on right now and what happened so far.