Posted on 11/11/2002 5:43:53 PM PST by doug from upland
Pentagon chiefs are planning to ring America with a fleet of huge unmanned airships to watch for missile attacks and terrorist activity.
The plan is seen as a high-technology reprise of the barrage balloons that guarded London during the Blitz.
The Pentagon has asked America's largest defence contractors to come up with bids for the giant airships, known as dirigibles, by the beginning of next year, the Los Angeles Times reported yesterday.
The airships would be capable of hovering high in the stratosphere for months, carrying a 4,000lb payload of detection equipment.
They would probably be powered by ultra-lightweight solar panels and would be up to three times larger than the Goodyear blimp, the renowned commercial airship.
The Pentagon has told contractors the airships would need to float at 70,000 feet, out of reach of anti-aircraft systems, and above the weather of lower altitudes.
Invisible to radar,cheaper than orbit, and they can stay up for quite some time
Ummm...maybe the technological advance is to orbit the blimps over our own territory, which is beyond the range of AA fire from other countries? I dunno, just a guess...
Dirigibles get the call: Uncle Sam wants you
Friday, May 17, 2002
Shades of Graf Zeppelin, USS Shenandoah and, oh the humanity, the Hindenberg.
Dirigibles -- massive flying machines that went the way of the mammoth a half-century ago -- are being resurrected as high-tech weapons in the war on terror.
An artist's concept of a Lockheed Martin high-altitude airship. The new airships will be high-tech weapons in the war on terror. |
Twice as big as a jumbo jet and soaring twice as high, they may soon be deployed to guard Canada and the United States, scanning for intruders on the Pacific Northwest's long coastline and international border.
The U.S. North American Air Defense Command -- NORAD -- in Colorado Springs, Colo., is considering a 21st-century generation of airships to watch for attacks, just as the military blimps from Tillamook, Ore., guarded the coastline and shipping lanes during World War II.
These airships, however, would be based on "lighter-than-air principles (but) would be more analogous to low-altitude satellites," said Maj. Ed Thomas, U.S. Aerospace Command spokesman in Colorado Springs.
The 700- to 800-foot-long dirigibles of the 1930s could soar up to 15,000 feet at nearly 80 mph. Specifications for the new generation of airships remain classified, but modern military planners envision a fleet of 10 remote-control craft. The airships, packed with radar and modern communication gear, could remain aloft for months, patrolling 13 miles above the Earth's surface in the calmest part of the atmosphere.
Satellites, by contrast, are much more expensive and can orbit or be parked thousands of miles above the surface. And unlike satellites, which generally cannot be retrieved except for a special space shuttle mission, airships can land for repairs or to take on new equipment.
"We are looking, from NORAD's perspective, at being able to provide enhanced radar coverage" of the perimeter of the continent, Thomas said. Ground-based radar is limited by the Earth's curvature.
NORAD, working jointly with the Army's space and missile defense command, has solicited design concepts from Lockheed Martin and The Boeing Co. A potential Department of Defense contract looms, though neither estimates nor funding have been developed.
The aerospace industry has been talking about airships for years. In addition to defense implications, high-flying airships might be used for resource management, disaster communications and weather monitoring. A South African concern considered building some in 1997, and last January India announced plans to develop its own. Some German firms have been talking about using modern technology for lighter-than-air cargo carriers.
Lockheed already owns veteran blimp maker Goodyear Aerospace Corp. of Akron, Ohio, and has been making airships since 1929. Lockheed now produces "Aerostats," small, remote-controlled, tethered blimps that float 15,000 feet high and are used to monitor the U.S.-Mexican border. It also builds the manned blimps used as flying billboards.
Boeing on May 2 agreed to work with CargoLifter of Germany to study high-altitude airships for commercial and military purposes. But on Monday, CargoLifter was said to be facing insolvency after failing to find initial funding. Boeing spokesman David Phillips said it remains unclear what that means for the arrangement.
"No deals have been signed and we are fully aware of the financial challenges of a start-up company," Phillips said. "We are discussing a broad number of potential commercial and military defense opportunities with them."
Boeing's Unmanned Systems Group and its innovative PhantomWorks research group are working on the concept, which has roots in technology that has been around since the first airship was built in 1900.
Dirigibles came into vogue in World War I, when the Germans used them as the B-52 bombers of their day. Their hydrogen-filled Zeppelin fleets bombed London -- until the British did them one better by inventing incendiary bullets.
In the 1920s and 1930s, Zeppelins came to be used for quick and luxurious trans-Atlantic passenger travel at more than 100 mph -- the Concorde of the day.
The first U.S. dirigible, the Navy's USS Shenandoah, launched in 1923, was the first rigid-frame airship filled with non-flammable helium. It crashed in a storm in 1925.
The end of the dirigible was foreshadowed in 1937 with an image burned forever into the public mind, as the 804-foot-long Zeppelin Hindenberg burst into flames in Lakehurst, N.J. A traumatized broadcaster witnessing the disaster moaned, "Oh, the humanity."
Though helium replaced flammable hydrogen, airships were eclipsed by always-faster and ever-bigger conventional aircraft, though the U.S. Navy used blimps for long over-water patrols into the 1960s.
There are four kinds of lighter-than-air ships: hot-air balloons; non-rigid blimps that maintain their shape by internal pressure; semi-rigid blimps with a solid keel but pressurized envelope; and rigid airships, or dirigibles such as the Zeppelins, with aluminum frames held aloft by lighter-than-air gas in cells.
The 500-foot-long airships proposed for NORAD "would not be rigid dirigible-type airships. They would have rigid structures to hold surveillance gear and engines, however," said Cary Dell, spokesman for Lockheed-Martin in Akron, Ohio.
"We proposed and first announced in 2000 a high-altitude airship, unmanned, to fly autonomously at 70,000 feet above the jet stream, where you get above a lot of weather. It would be feasible for autonomous platforms up there, with ground controls, to stay on station in a relatively synchronous position," Dell said. NORAD showed interest last year.
Although NORAD wants the new high-altitude airships for radar surveillance, they could eventually hold other systems, said Thomas, the NORAD spokesman.
"It would be a truck, so to speak, that can carry different payloads -- imagery, infrared warning systems, communications and other uses," Thomas said.
Some privacy watchdog groups say lighter-than-air craft could whip up controversy, depending on the nature of the surveillance.
"Radar itself probably doesn't have any privacy implications, but if they start using video cameras and monitoring equipment on the ground, that would be a problem," David Banisar, deputy director of Privacy International, a Washington, D.C., surveillance watchdog group, recently told the Denver Post. "But it all sounds fairly ludicrous right now."
Well now, to be truthfull, there are some gaps in covering all air traffic at *all* atltitudes ...
I've been intrigued with the idea of Airships for 30 years for use as heavy-lift transport haulers. True, they're much slower than fixed wing aircraft. However, the cost per-mile-per-ton would a fraction of that of a cargo jet, and they could still cover USA to Europe or Asia in a couple of days. Seems like it'd be a great alternative to ship heavy equipment "2nd day air" to Asia at container cargo pricing.
Similarly, Popular Mechanics has had artist drawings some years ago of Airship-passenger liners. What would you choose for a trip to Asia? A nine-to-fifteen hour trip with your head between your knees, or a 36 hour weekend-trip with comfortable beds, fine dinning and entertainment, and a chance to get over the jet lag BEFORE you hit your destination (at half the cost of the plane ticket!). As one who has done the Trans-atlantic and Trans-pacific runs, I can tell you that airships would rule for long distance travel, and probably, would spur new investment in SST technology (because the air carriers would have to economically reduce the travel time to a few hours to beat the airships).
If the DOD does the ground work, I'll bet the air freight companies will be close behind seeking to implement the technology into their industries.
FReegards.. SFS
Boeing dreaming up new flying machine By Ken Kaye Staff Writer Posted November 10 2002
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This might be a bit of a problem ... with the discharge of a missile drastically altering the 'flight' characteristics and stability which then would require some minutes to re-orient/restabilize the platform during which time the RADAR and other observation equipment will have lost any 'targets' under track prior to said launch ...
This would not be a bad follow-on contract for a few lighter than air craft whose only function was to provide a platform for missiles - but the BIG advantage is the direct line-of-sight advantage that being airborne gives RADAR and optical sighting/detection technologies ...
I see this "lighter than air" technology as having only niche application - with defense surveilance as being *the* one. We have moved past the 'dream' stage of getting 'something for nothing' in the way of lighter than air craft - the winds and weather are just waaaay to variable for anything like this to be used for serious purposes regularly on any kind of schedule (as it would require it to pass into 'the weather layers' under next to ideal conditions thereby rendering it highly unpredictable and unreliable)!
Need GREAT weight/freight-hauling capability? Then make use of barge, ocean-going freight or train-car transportation ...
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