The reason why this nonsense annoys me is because so far the Govt has given £6M in grants, on top of goodness knows how much crowd-funding, then there was the £60M that the US spent. Then there are the investors who have spent "some beans". It is such a waste.
If you want to bring along the aerospace industry in the UK then get the Air Cadets some gliders - 60x conventional gliders with support would be around £6M. Much better for the aerospace future of the country when most sensible people can see that this gas-bag folly is going nowhere - to quote Lt Montgomery Scott " You cannae rewrite the laws of physics".
I've seen similar sums wasted on things like Herti in the past. We all knew it wouldn't work for what we wanted it for. Several said so, but we ploughed on blindly and wasted money on something that could never deliver the requirement. This thing will be the same. I'm even hearing the use of the smartphone tagline "we could use it for things that we haven't even thought about yet" - that's a lot of money and effort for something that has failed so many times in the past. The big beasty only carries 50 people for 4 days - it isn't exactly the QE2!!!
In 5 years time the hangars at Cardington will be empty and then some bright spark will say "I know, why don't we build an airship that can fly for 31 days and deliver huge cargo loads accross the globe?". Then the madness will start all over again.
LJ