Massive airship being built by Google’s Brin

Co-founder mum on project but fascinated by such craft

GOOGLE co-founder Sergey Brin, has secretly been building a massive airship inside Hangar 2 at the Nasa Ames Research Centre.

It’s unclear whether the craft, which looks like a eppelin, is a hobby or something Brin hopes to turn into a business. “Sorry, I don’t have anything to say about this topic,” Brin wrote in an email.

Four people familiar with the project said Brin has long been fascinated by airships.

Ames, which is next to Google parent Alphabet’s headquarters in California, was home to the USS Macon, a huge airship built by the US Navy in the 1930s. About three years ago, Brin decided to build his own after ogling old photos of it.

In 2015, Google’s Planetary Ventures took over the hangars at Ames from Nasa and turned them into laboratories. Brin’s airship, which isn’t an Alphabet project, is taking shape inside. Engineers have constructed a metal skeleton of the craft.

Alan Weston, the former director of programmes at Nasa Ames, reportedly is leading Brin’s airship project. Weston didn’t respond to requests for comment.

At the University of Oxford, Weston was a key member of the Dangerous Sports Club – a group of intelligent risk-takers that formed in the 1970s and did things such as catapult people across fields into nets.

Members of the club are credited with inventing the modern form of bungee jumping. Weston performed one of the first bungee jumps by hurling himself off California’s Golden Gate Bridge and then eluded the authorities waiting to capture him on shore.

Weston previously worked on the US government’s Strategic Defence Initiative – known as the Star Wars missile defence system. In 1989, he oversaw one of the first tests of Star Wars, which aimed to destroy incoming Russian missiles mid-air with weapons fired from space.

At Nasa he worked on the development of a low-cost lunar lander.

In a radio interview in 2013, Weston described plans for an airship to haul cargo. The idea is that airships could be more fuel-efficient than planes and carry loads to where they’re needed, rather than to airports or shipping stations.

Brin’s airship is separate from a project called Calcifer that was shelved by Google X, the company’s experimental research lab, in 2014.

Alphabet chief Larry Page, Google co-founder, has funded secretive flying-car projects – start-ups Kitty Hawk and Zee.Aero, also separate from Alphabet. On Monday, Kitty Hawk released a video showing one of its all-electric vehicles taking off and soaring over a lake with the driver perched on top. – Bloomberg

PICTURE: AP NEW ZEPPELIN: A lot of work goes into building an airship. Inset: Sergey Brin.