There are different designs. Because this technology has been held back for so long, and technology has moved so far forward, it's not clear what the dominant design is going to be. Are they going to be a cigar shape? Are they going to be one of these flat-shaped ones that take care of aerodynamic lift? Are they going to be a non-rigid structure, with a flexible envelope, or are they going to be a rigid structure? Will it be composite materials? Will it be aluminum? Will they have one big gas bag or many cells?
One of the exciting aspects of this technology is that we're going to find out. In fact, one of the things we'd like to encourage is innovation and competition.
One of the arguments that I would suggest to the committee is to think about the notion of public hangars. I know this may be anathema to this committee to even think about any kind of expenditure at this point, and I respect that as a taxpayer. But in transportation it's a shared jurisdiction. The public provides the roads, the private sector provides the trucks. The public sector provides the airports, the private sector provides the airplanes. The public provides ports, the private sector provides the ships.
In the case of airships, don't think of them as being hangars, think of them as being like dry docks. We have public dry docks. They are a place where you could encourage many companies to take advantage of this, so you'd get multiple companies competing in the industry, you'd get rapid technological advance, you'd get many ideas tried, and then we'd find out what works best.