I think this is way cool. I hope it marks the beginning of the return of the rigid airship.

"The rationale for bringing back this type of airship relates to its ability to deliver heavy, outsized cargo..." Surely the *main* reason for bringing zepps back is the fact that to keep them flying costs virtually *nothing* whilst to keep, say, a 747 flying costs about 70% of the fuel it uses, which is to say, a heck of a lot!
Cover an airship with thin film solar and it could power itself for free - obviously you would need something for the night time!
Mark my words, short of hyperloops or teleportation, airships will be the next mass-transit mode of transport for humanity. Safe, luxurious and very cheap to run, half-mile long zeppelins will one day cruise the skies just as ocean liners currently cruise the seas. MW

Planet earth actually has a supply side problem with the element Helium. They better develop a commercially feasible method of extracting it from the atmosphere, or magically sucking it from the abundant reserves of the universe in order to have their ship take off in a big way, business-wise.

I suggest that the Aeroscraft would be a good candidate for solar power.The shape of the dorsal area could be covered with flexible solar batteries.The rear engine would remain internal combustion for needed extra power to change altitude and emergencies.The ribs could act to stabilize the power lines ,thus rendering the operation safe and the maintenance manageable.

BeWalt:
The problem would not be so bad if the U.S. government had not recently decided to relieve itself of its Strategic Helium Reserve, which was the largest in the world. Government short-sightedness will likely make helium supply an obstacle now rather than the boost it would have been.
I agree that it would be great to find a way to extract it from air, but according to Wikipedia the atmosphere is only 0.000524% helium. That means you have to process A LOT of air, even if you find an otherwise efficient extraction process.

I'm a huge fan of airships, though if you make any historical study of them there seem to be challenges that technology could probably overcome and things that seem to be more difficult. Of course since the 1930's golden age of Zeppelins a vast amount of advancements have been made, and surely the new ballasting method and swiveling engines and lighter materials will be big gains. But what really wrecked so many airships was simply that so many were lost in storms. You still have the problem that they are slow and huge and are not going to be able to rise high enough to get above storms or outrun them or find ground shelter in most of the places they visit. Some of this can be minimized with intense careful operational management, but some of it will come down to luck as the weather is simply not 100% predictable. It is true that modern blimps have maintained a fairly good safety record, but also that there are very few of them, and they are not workhorses of industry, and so there is no that much pressure on the operators to risk any kind of dicey weather. So that is my main concern about bringing back the airships, magnificent as they are.

Anne Ominous is correct. Currently, the technology for Helium extraction is vastly improved over what it was- we are now able to extract .05% by volume just as economically, where it used to be 5-.5% by volume. It opens up a lot more Helium sources, aside from the uncommonly pure ones. Despite being a renewable portion of our atmosphere, it would still take an estimated 300% more energy investment to draw it from air rather than natural gas- notwithstanding technological limitations.
Fortunately, airships don't use nearly as much Helium as you might imagine, and their rate of loss is extremely low- in this case, further aided by the fact that the Aeroscraft should never have to vent Helium in normal operation.
David, the full-size aircraft's powerplant is meant to be a hybrid diesel-electric, for efficiency's sake. I don't know if that would make for a good fit with solar panels- one gets the impression that they wouldn't want to take up valuable payload and space with heavy batteries for storing the excess energy and delivering it smoothly to the motors. However, there is another hybrid airship with a delta-shape, and therefore an even larger surface area, that does use flexible thin-film solar panels. It's Canadian, called the "Solar Ship."

For He reserves please refer to this BLM document from 2007. http://www.blm.gov/pgdata/etc/medialib/blm/nm/programs/0/helium_docs.Par.56459.File.dat/HeliumTN429_3-09.pdf.

All you people saying blimps are the future can be quiet.
There is a reason why blimps aren't widely used and are NOT considered safe outside of the fairest weather conditions. (that should give you a hint...) And it doesn't seem anybody has solved the problem.
I'll spell it out for you: They are huge, and not very dense! That means that the littlest gust of wind (little, in terms of MPH, but not in terms of energy,) can exert a huge amount of force on the blimp, making it impossible to keep steady and under control.
They will always, at most, be niche vehicles. They can ONLY fly safely when there is no wind.

Just use hydrogen gas instead of helium. What could possibly go wrong?