1) the personal entertainment vehicle skyyacht http://www.personalblimp.com/index.html

2) the supposedly as good as a plane bobbing/swimming twin gliding blimp: http://www.fuellessflight.com/

3) staged ballooning to launch rockets from airship platforms (aka rockkoons or otherwise. ) http://www.jpaerospace.com/

oh yea you point out the following:

Problems with Helium sourcing (its an expensive strategic resource, suffering, like all other commodities, a 50% price increase in 2007),

this isn’t strictly a problem per se—just the commodity markets. texas produces vast quantities of helium and apparently much natural gas contains helium that is simply lost as the natural gas exits the earth…the technology to capture it is expensive but can maintained.
also, hydrogen is a VERY cheap substitute than can even be manurfactured on board a blimp with a ready supply of water (which can be soaked up through the atmosphere) the hydrogen problem is simply one of saftey , but realistically if you doped up the hyrdogen gas with some other gasses, separated the gas sac’s as with a cluster balloon setup and housed that inside a larger bag of C02, or figured out some equivelently ridiculous setup, hyrogen floating would be much safer.

2. the fact that airships can only travel about 100mph and despite there very large size, —–this is the big problem and must be accepted, you simply cannot go very fast as you get bigger. i like the idea of the blimp that floats up , and then deflated to maintain a slim profile as it glides down, one can glide at 200mph easily…..but this is unrealistic. the speed just can’t be overcome, it’s a lot like the same problem in boating. but………if you take into account that there are many people and objects that don’t need to get where they’re going as fast as possible, then this is the solution to them.

3. hold only a small fraction of the passengers that commercialaircraft do, : simply engineerable, a meer fact observable now, which may not be the case later.

4. Turbulent weather saftey issues yet to be resolved), planes have the same problems here. only with larger vehicles it becomes more of an issue, not much different than with planes really.

X5….you didn’t mention the possibilty for puncture/catostrophic failure. most peole worry about that, especially after watching the video of the hindenberg. the answer here is just more techonological innovation and better engineering.

1) the personal entertainment vehicle skyyacht http://www.personalblimp.com/index.html

2) the supposedly as good as a plane bobbing/swimming twin gliding blimp: http://www.fuellessflight.com/

3) staged ballooning to launch rockets from airship platforms (aka rockkoons or otherwise. ) http://www.jpaerospace.com/