By whatever name it goes, when all said and done it is a helium balloon by any other name. That which keeps it aloft is helium and the curious thing about helium is we are told we are running out of it. Here is a link to the bit about running out of it:
https://www.quora.com/Are-we-really-...-out-of-helium
Do these chaps at Hybrid know something that these other folk, who fear we are running out of the stuff, don`t know about so that they can blow their balloon up with 1.34 m cu.ft. of some kind of stuff to get it off the ground.
I can't do the sums quickly (or at all to be honest!) but Chronus is right - we are 'running out' of Helium, although not overnight, so to speak.
1.4 million cu/ft of Helium is a lot, but not if you liquify it and that is where the serious use of Helium is; LHe for MRI Scanners. Magnetic Resonance Imagers. When I first started working on them in the early nineties, a 500 litre LHe transfill was required about twice or three times a year, for each 1.5 Tesla magnet. There were not so many of them then, but there are loads of them now and almost every DGH has one (or more!).
Through development, Helium losses have been reduced dramatically to roughly one 500 litre transfill every couple of years, but the costs are roughly the same as they were. The last time I heard a price for it, given that we used tens of thousands of Litres per year, was about £5.50/litre delivered. For small quantities I have heard prices of £100/lt. The thing about liquid Helium is; it boils locally at minus silly degrees and changes phase into
seven hundred times its volume. In other words, one litre of liquid Helium becomes 700 lt of gaseous helium.
Massive efforts are being made to reduce the overall liquid content of MRI magnets - this cannot be done retrospectively - from up to 2000 lt to less than 200 lt. Research is also being done into 'High Temperature Superconductors', which would be better, but it is rather flying in the face of the laws of physics at the moment. They have made materials that will superconduct at say, liquid Nitrogen temperatures, but it cannot yet be formed into any material that could be wound into a solenoid.
Several times in the last few years - I have been retired since July - there have been severe shortages of LHe, such that we had to wait several weeks for individual tankers to arrive from Morocco. As for 'making Helium' out of the atmosphere, we were always told that once He gets out, it goes straight up, does not pass go and collects almost nowhere and thus is very, very difficult to recover. The source of He is from Natural Gas and Oil deposits, it is or was, a by product. In the 1930's the US oil industry had to put silencers on the reservoir helium vents, there was so much coming out and being vented to atmosphere.
The plant that supplied us had 'a gas bag' into which each and every container, be it cylinder of gas or dewar of liquids, was vented when they were 'empty'. This 'dirty gas' was reliquified at the plant and reused, but they couldn't (and don't anywhere) distill it out of the air, because its already at the very top of the atmosphere.
Sorry to get technical.
Landroger