A number of discrete cells, each filled with hydrogen, fit inside the rib cage, and the entire ship was covered with fabric. In 1900, in Germany, Count Ferdinand von Zeppelin built something much larger and stronger, adding a rigid aluminum framework-long internal girders, attached to flexible rings, that formed a kind of rib cage. The first one was built in 1852, by the French engineer Jules Henri Giffard it was a hundred and forty-four feet long, with a propeller and a three-horsepower steam engine. It’s basically a balloon with a rudder and a means of propulsion. He told her that they would move beyond advertising blimps-way beyond.Ī blimp is just one type of airship, usually a small one, and always nonrigid, meaning that it has no structural hull its shape is maintained by the pressure of the lifting gas within.

“We are just beginning,” he said to Marina. With a team of two dozen workers, Pasternak built several blimps, at more than two million dollars apiece, for use by companies including MasterCard, Spalding, the Malaysia tourism board, and, in Germany, Commerzbank. “We are getting there,” Pasternak told Marina.īy 2000, they had developed the 40B Sky Dragon, which featured an electronic steering mechanism, automated pressure control, and an optional set of spotlights inside the hull, to create a dazzling “night glow” effect. The first blimp they built, the Aeros 50, was a seventy-eight-foot one-seater, which they sold to an Atlanta company to use for advertising during the 1996 Paralympic Games. Pasternak set up shop there, with Marina, their father, and a few friends from Lviv. Castle Air Force Base, about two hours south of San Francisco, had recently been scheduled to close, and the hangars that had once housed B-52 bombers were available for lease. They lived in California, and to pay the rent they had resorted to gluing envelopes for cash. He called his sister, Marina, who was also an engineer and had immigrated two years earlier, with the rest of the family. He rented an office in New York City, hired a translator, and proclaimed himself an American blimp-maker, but he found no customers.

In 1994, at the age of twenty-nine, Pasternak brought the business to the United States. By 1986, he had started a business manufacturing tethered blimps for advertising-one of the first private aerospace companies permitted under Mikhail Gorbachev’s perestroika reforms. In high school, he formed an airship club and was invited to present his designs to a gathering of aerospace engineers in Moscow at Lviv National University, where he studied civil engineering, he established an airship-design bureau. Instead, Igor drew pictures and worked on equations. His parents, civil engineers, thought that he would move on to more practical interests. Where are all the airships? he asked himself. One day, on the way there, he looked into the sky, and the emptiness seized him. He spent the summer in the library, studying the history and the aerodynamic principles of blimps. It would be able to haul hundreds of tons of mining equipment to remote regions in Siberia in one go, the article said-no roads, runways, or infrastructure needed. He saw old photographs of imposing wartime zeppelins and read about another kind of airship, which had never made it off the drawing board: an airship that carried not passengers but cargo. He was reading a magazine aimed at young inventors, and he came across an article about blimps. One night, he was curled up in the soft green chair that doubled as his bed, in the two-room apartment where he lived with his parents, his little sister, and his grandmother, in the city of Lviv, in western Ukraine. Back then, in the nineteen-seventies, he loved rockets. Igor Pasternak started thinking about airships when he was twelve.

Cargolifter artist concepltion