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Is there a possible future in which lowered cost to orbit and helium scarcity makes it economically viable to harvest helium in giant sacs in space, and then use “gas stations” floating in the upper atmosphere at different buoyancies to shuttle it down to airships?

I have no idea how many problems there are with that, or how diffuse helium is/how hard it would be to harvest from space, but floating airship stations like Bespin would be awesome.



To a first approximation, space is a vacuum.

Most of the second approximation is hydrogen not helium.

Yes proportionally, there’s a fair bit of helium but most of what’s there is nothing.


Is that true of the upper atmosphere? Wouldn’t it clump there due to gravity?

And if it doesn’t clump there, does it clump anywhere, or is there some reason it’s naturally diffuse?


Solar wind blows it away.


Helium's so scarce. You're attempting to reduce ultra high vacuum to even less. Not practical




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