The German company for the CL160 CargoLifter followed Mr. In March the German press predicted that the company would be out of money come April. Designers are to aeronautical engineers as architects are to structural engineers. CargoLifter is cooperating with a number of partners and potential users to further define and develop both markets and products. But with no ships and construction costs mounting, CargoLifter's shares plunged 75%. CargoLifter is also pursuing the CL160 airship, which is capable of carrying outsized and heavy goods over long distances. Since then a team of 260 engineers (including the cream of the world's airship designers) has puffed away. The German government provided subsidies and made available a former Soviet airfield as the hangar site, in exchange for CargoLifter's commitment to create jobs. Siemens, Mitsui and other industrial manufacturers expressed interest, a big reason CargoLifter had, by May 2000, amassed the largest private placement in German history. You could pick up a turbine in Stuttgart, say, and drop it in Brazil. A lawyer and professor of global logistics, von Gablenz came up with the idea of a vehicle that could float giant industrial components above all the railroad tunnels and highway overpasses that create nightmares for ground transport planners. The ships, the shed and the shop itself are all brainchildren of Carl von Gablenz, 50, grandson of a cofounder of Lufthansa. CargoLifter says that the building will serve not just as a hangar but as the manufacturing site for the first of 50 giant CL160 airships, so called because each ship will lift 160 tonnes. It is so big that designers had to consider the possibility that clouds would form inside. It's quite a hangar-the largest building in the world with no internal supports-365 meters long, 200 meters wide, 100 meters tall. What does? A gigantic shed outside Berlin. Though the German company has been designing a prototype for four years, a finished vehicle does not exist. In Texas ranchers disparage an upstart by saying he is "all hat, no cattle." That western saw aptly describes the predicament of CargoLifter, a would-be manufacturer of heavy-lift dirigibles that so far has lifted $263 million from investors and done precious little else.
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