A start-up company is planning to offer tourists rides in a 250-foot zeppelin over the San Francisco Bay, Napa Valley and the Golden Gate Bridge. Airship Ventures said Thursday that it plans to begin passenger flights in a German-made Zeppelin NT airship, to be based at NASA's Moffett Field airstrip about 40 miles south of San Francisco, in mid-2008.
This company (http://www.zeppelin-nt.de/index_e.htm -- website is in German, with some English) has already built, flown, and sold a few of these new passenger zepplins around the world. Of course, we've had generally passengerless dirigibles like the Goodyear blimps around for many, many years.
The article interest me because of my personal affinity for dirigibles, but it's also thought provoking in that it suggests the future echoes the past in unexpected ways. Jet Age retrofuturism projected rocket cars and personal jet packs for commuters, innovations that are not practical realities and exist today only for a tiny number of committed thrill-seekers. The Zepplin, once a symbol of modernity and the conquest of the air, was not expected to contend for the skies again after the Hindenburg disaster of 1937, yet it may be more likely to feature in our real future that anything like the hover bubble/rocket car featured in The Jetsons.
What other elements of the past do you expect to be more a part of the future than they are of the present?
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