Cargo Airships Are Happening

Cargo airships will not happen,in any land based area where wind happens,ie :anywhere this has been hammered flat on numerous aviation engineering forums the only way around the guaranteed ground handling debaucle is to engineer mega structur masts for anchoring,which will need to have a circular pad underneath,where the cargo would have to follow the LTA,as it pivots in the wind so back to a debaucle,with lots of smashing stuff one possibility is airship to ocean ship transfers where wind drift can be managed.....sort of could be made to work for passengers snd small cargo that loads through the central pivot in the mast still the anchoring phase will always be very high risk

I'd bet a bunch of former SpaceX engineers will figure out a solution.

Yeah, dude was head of Hyperloop. Nailed that one

I take your point in that there are a lot of naysayers here, as there were with Hyperloop. There were also hundreds of volunteers working on the project, who clearly thought it had a chance of working--and many more saying rockets would never be made reusable, it had been tried before, too many problems that can never be solved...

“Success is stumbling from failure to failure with no loss of enthusiasm.” - Winston Churchill

Why do people lionize trying ideas that are known to be dumb and/or impossible? Is it because we just no longer believe that things truly are impossible (or dumb)? The ideas that all turn out to be "impossible" successes are ones where the math or physics bears out the idea but the engineering is "impossible."

Hyperloop (and vacuum train systems for the ~100 years they were called that before the Musk rebrand) had physics problems, and no matter how hard anyone tried, they were guaranteed to run into them. Cargo airships also have a physics problem that make them absurdly expensive and risky to put cargo on. In both cases, this is an idea that is 100 years old and where the physics has been studied. This time is not different unless you have solid reasoning.

Contrast that with rockets, to use another Musk example: Rockets are well within the bounds of physics, but a hard engineering problem. Landing a rocket propulsively was also known to be an "impossible" engineering challenge that was first demonstrated in the 1990's (with too low reliability).

>Why do people lionize trying ideas that are known to be dumb and/or impossible?

Because airships are really cool.