Well, it's a question about assessment of an aircraft I suppose!
I've been keeping half an eye on what the chaps are doing up the road - I'm not involved, but I've had an interest in airships over the years which I've fed with quite a lot of historical research, and frankly it's just interesting to see new technology going on.
The fundamental problems, historically, with airships, have been various - including:-
(1) Intolerance to variability in payload
(2) Hydrogen!
(3) Airborne manoeuvring stresses
(4) Intolerance to changes in air density.
Lining up this project against those...
(1) The company appear to be marketing it as a carrier of electronic intelligence payloads. So, no significant changes in payload within a mission - cargo or pax in other words, so that seems sensible.
(2) It's Helium.
(3) They seem to have spent an enormous amount of money on development of the airship. Presumably that has included rigorous aeroelastic and manoeuvring analysis. So, until proven otherwise, I'm inclined to believe that they're getting that right.
(4) It's a hybrid - so the use of aerodynamic lift should mitigate the changes of floatation lift with changes in air density. It won't solve the problem altogether, and I can't help feel that the FL200 design spec that the US military were asking them to achieve is a bit optimistic - but it should be better off than, say, the R100 and R101 were ever going to be.
There's certainly a potential market out there for pseudo-geostationary relay capability. Just think, for example, of the posibilities of having a load of telecoms relay gear in an airship that you could position at a few days or weeks notice overhead a major sporting event, or some kind of national emergency.
I think that the military uses mooted are perhaps less sensible - apart from the fact that they're always going to struggle to hit the performance targets the US military were mooting [it's only about 700,000ft^3 isn't it? - I can't see that really hitting a 50 tonne payload], and it would be a bit of an easy target for pretty unsophisticated weaponry.
But, given that most of the R&D costs have been picked up by somebody else and written off, and that they seem to have put decent thought into historic problems with airship technology, and that IT and Telecoms technology is getting less hungry of mass and power year on year...
... just maybe, it'll work. I really hope so, there's just something incredibly sexy about airships isn't there.