Igor Pasternak started thinking about airships when he was twelve. Back then, in the nineteen-seventies, he loved rockets. One night, he was curled up in the soft green chair that doubled as his bed, in the two-room apartment where he lived with his parents, his little sister, and his grandmother, in the city of Lviv, in western Ukraine. He was reading a magazine aimed at young inventors, and he came across an article about blimps. He saw old photographs of imposing wartime zeppelins and read about another kind of airship, which had never made it off the drawing board: an airship that carried not passengers but cargo. It would be able to haul hundreds of tons of mining equipment to remote regions in Siberia in one go, the article said—no roads, runways, or infrastructure needed. Just lift, soar, and drop.

Igor wondered what the holdup was. He read the article again and again. He spent the summer in the library, studying the history and the aerodynamic principles of blimps. One day, on the way there, he looked into the sky, and the emptiness seized him.

Where are all the airships? he asked himself. The world needs airships.

His parents, civil engineers, thought that he would move on to more practical interests. Instead, Igor drew pictures and worked on equations. In high school, he formed an airship club and was invited to present his designs to a gathering of aerospace engineers in Moscow; at Lviv National University, where he studied civil engineering, he established an airship-design bureau. By 1986, he had started a business manufacturing tethered blimps for advertising—one of the first private aerospace companies permitted under Mikhail Gorbachev’s perestroika reforms.

In 1994, at the age of twenty-nine, Pasternak brought the business to the United States. He knew no English. He knew blimps. He rented an office in New York City, hired a translator, and proclaimed himself an American blimp-maker, but he found no customers. He called his sister, Marina, who was also an engineer and had immigrated two years earlier, with the rest of the family. They lived in California, and to pay the rent they had resorted to gluing envelopes for cash. Castle Air Force Base, about two hours south of San Francisco, had recently been scheduled to close, and the hangars that had once housed B-52 bombers were available for lease. Pasternak set up shop there, with Marina, their father, and a few friends from Lviv. The first blimp they built, the Aeros 50, was a seventy-eight-foot one-seater, which they sold to an Atlanta company to use for advertising during the 1996 Paralympic Games. “We are getting there,” Pasternak told Marina.

By 2000, they had developed the 40B Sky Dragon, which featured an electronic steering mechanism, automated pressure control, and an optional set of spotlights inside the hull, to create a dazzling “night glow” effect. The Sky Dragon was a hit. With a team of two dozen workers, Pasternak built several blimps, at more than two million dollars apiece, for use by companies including MasterCard, Spalding, the Malaysia tourism board, and, in Germany, Commerzbank. “We are just beginning,” he said to Marina. He told her that they would move beyond advertising blimps—way beyond.

A blimp is just one type of airship, usually a small one, and always nonrigid, meaning that it has no structural hull; its shape is maintained by the pressure of the lifting gas within. It’s basically a balloon with a rudder and a means of propulsion. The first one was built in 1852, by the French engineer Jules Henri Giffard; it was a hundred and forty-four feet long, with a propeller and a three-horsepower steam engine. In 1900, in Germany, Count Ferdinand von Zeppelin built something much larger and stronger, adding a rigid aluminum framework—long internal girders, attached to flexible rings, that formed a kind of rib cage. A number of discrete cells, each filled with hydrogen, fit inside the rib cage, and the entire ship was covered with fabric. The first of these, the LZ 1, was four hundred and twenty feet long, and Zeppelin kept making them bigger. He started the world’s first airline company, DELAG (Deutsche Luftschiffahrts-Aktiengesellschaft), and by 1914 the service had made more than fifteen hundred flights, transporting upward of ten thousand people. Before long, Italy, Great Britain, the United States, and other countries began building airships.

The gas cells of many of the early zeppelins were made from so-called goldbeater’s skin: cow intestines beaten to a pulp and then stretched. It took two hundred and fifty thousand cows to make one airship. During the First World War, Germany and its allies ceased production of sausages so that there would be enough cow guts to make zeppelins from which to bomb England. Advances in fabric-manufacturing technology—including the invention, in 1839, of vulcanized rubber, by the American merchant Charles Goodyear— prompted a frenzy of airship innovation. In the early nineteen-thirties, the U.S. Navy built two “flying aircraft carriers,” the Akron and the Macon, whose bellies could open to release fleets of F9C Sparrowhawk fighter planes. (The ships crashed, in separate storms, before proving their battleworthiness.)

Then airships went away. On May 6, 1937, the Hindenburg exploded over Lakehurst, New Jersey, in a ball of fire that killed thirty-six passengers and crew members; the tragedy was captured on film. The idea of people floating comfortably beneath a container of explosive hydrogen became, in an instant, ridiculous. (Modern airships use only helium, which is not flammable.) Fixed-wing aircraft, such as Pan American Airways’ speedy “flying boats,” became increasingly popular and more economical. A few of the airship engineers I talked to lamented the fact that, until 1999, when a compilation entitled “Airship Technology” was published, the only textbook available to them on airship engineering was Charles B. Burgess’s “Airship Design,” which came out in 1927.

Airship designers eventually abandoned the idea of carrying passengers and embraced the notion of carrying cargo, which is achieved only inefficiently by rail, roads, and sea, and isn’t achieved at all in remote areas. A few early projects gained traction. In the nineteen-seventies, William Miller, a former Navy fighter pilot in New Jersey, tested a ship with an aerodynamic deltoid shape, called the Aereon 26. (John McPhee wrote about Miller for this magazine in 1973.) But Miller ran out of funds after just one test flight. Everywhere, the return of the airship kept being the almost return of the airship. Merely creating a prototype of a cargo airship required enormous capital, and prospective buyers were scarce. In Germany, Cargolifter A.G. got as far as building the world’s largest freestanding building, more than a thousand feet long, in which the company planned to construct a helium-filled semirigid cargo hauler. But Cargolifter filed for bankruptcy in 2002; the hangar, outside Berlin, was later turned into Tropical Islands, Europe’s largest indoor water park.