One of the hottest genres of movies today are superhero franchises where larger than life characters appear on screen doing things well beyond the imagination of most people. The founders of Google are similar to these onscreen titans in many respects. They have more money than most people can easily comprehend, earned through their towering intelligence and foresight which allowed them to create a company which does some truly amazing things.
In keeping with this theme of seemingly larger than life goals which make the impossible possible, Sergey Brin has apparently decided he wants an airship. This desire seems to have taken root a few years ago. Brin would visit the NASA Ames Research Center which is adjacent to Google parent Alphabet Inc.’s headquarters in Mountain View California. This was the site where a huge airship the USS Macon was developed by the US Navy in the 1930s.
Several years ago this great depression era project apparently awakened a desire in Brin to have an airship of his own. To achieve this goal several large hangers at Ames were taken over from NASA by Planetary Ventures, a Google unit. These were to be outfitted as laboratories for the company and its prototypes. Brin’s secret airship has begun to take shape inside one of these hangers as a metal skeleton and apparently nearly fills the cavernous space.
While the thought of owning your own airship is fun actually building giant airships is a time consuming endeavor which requires a great deal of technical expertise. Sergey Brin is a very busy man and certainly does not have time for that so to lead this project he has found a uniquely talented individual.
Alan Weston is the former director of programs at NASA Ames and is reportedly the man in charge of the development of Brin’s secret airship. Weston has declined to comment on this but given his history he seems singularly qualified to head up such a project. Weston attended the internationally acclaimed University of Oxford where he helped found the Dangerous Sports Club.
This group of hyper intelligent thrill seekers was formed in the 1970s and along with other similar innovative activities created modern bungee jumping. Weston himself performed one of the first bungee jumps off the Golden Gate Bridge a feat made all the more impressive by the fact that he was able to evade capture by the authorities waiting onshore to arrest him for this stunt.
Weston whose life story is filled with such daring exploits eventually gave up having adventures and joined the Air Force. During his tenure there he did engineering work for the U.S. governments first attempt at creating a missile defense system in the 1980s. After his term in the Air Force Weston joined NASA where he worked on a number of projects and eventually became the program director at Ames.
While at Ames Weston gave a number of interviews discussing the possibilities of commercializing space and the technologies required for interstellar travel. Then, in a 2013 radio interview, Weston described the future of airships including as vehicles for moving cargo. There is no telling if this interview is what convinced Brin that Weston was the man he needed to head up his new project but it certainly could not have hurt his chances.
The airship is apparently a project of Brin’s rather than being an Alphabet project and is unrelated to any project which Alphabet has worked on in the past, or which Google co-founder Larry Page is engaged in. Brin has declined to comment on the project at so there is information available at this time as to whether this is a commercial project or simply a hobby. This failure to comment leaves the public free to speculate as to the purpose of the proposed airship or the rumors that it will be equipped with laser cannons and a plank.
