Posted on 11/07/2006 7:38:47 PM PST by FLOutdoorsman
WASHINGTON — In the era of $300 million fighter jets, satellite-guided rockets and complicated battlefield computer networks, Multimax Inc. is trying to revive an old-fashioned technology to thrust the information technology firm onto the front line. The Largo, Md., company has spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on this new project, the design looks like an elliptical UFO, but the result will be familiar: It’s a blimp.
“It is somewhat uncharted waters” for the firm, said Ron Oholendt, a retired Air Force colonel and the program manager. The company has enlisted help from NASA and scientists at the Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Ohio, which is analyzing the design, and last year began hunting for support from the Pentagon, Department of Homeland Security or the Director of National Intelligence. With $14 million, the company could finish building and test a prototype for its airship, which they call the Maxflyer, Oholendt said. The company plans to submit a proposal for the system with the Homeland Security Department on Friday, he said.
Multimax is one of several defense companies pouncing on the military’s renewed interest in using high-flying, unmanned, helium-filled balloons — sometimes tied to the ground with a long rope — as possible weapons. Lockheed Martin Corp. is developing a blimp that it says will reach an altitude of 65,000 feet, while Raytheon Co. is developing one designed to reach 10,000 feet and be tethered to the ground. Blackwater USA, better known as one of the largest security contractors in Iraq, expects to finish its prototype, which aims to reach an altitude of 5,000 feet to 15,000 feet, in December.
The military’s interest is driven by a search for cheap alternatives to satellites and unmanned aerial vehicles, or drones. Some low-flying versions are already in Iraq, Afghanistan and along the U.S.-Mexico border. The blimps are known as airships or aerostats, a type that is tethered to the ground, and can stay up longer than the unmanned aerial vehicles popularized by the Iraq war and are cheaper than military satellites that can take years to launch, supporters of the technology say.
“They can stay aloft very efficiently for long periods of times,” said Col. Jeff Souder, product manager for an Army program. An airship is “somewhere around five to seven times less expensive than a manned aircraft per hour, and it would be greatly less expensive than satellites.”
The market is still small, but analysts say it could develop into a multibillion-dollar industry if the technology can survive the pitfalls that led to its initial demise, including being shot down by enemy gunfire or falling prey to damage by bad weather. “They make a heck of a big target in the sky, but it’s possible they could have communications, missile-detection and other applications,” said Michel Merluzeau, director of military airborne systems at Frost & Sullivan Inc., a research firm. “They still make a very big blip on a radar screen, so you can’t put them too close to the enemy.”
The experiment harkens back to the military’s use of blimps to hunt for submarines on the East and West coasts during World War II, historians say. “In the ’20s or ’30s, the Navy would send them out ahead of battleships to find the enemy and radio back,” said Jack Green of the Naval Historical Center. “They would go out for days and possibly weeks.”
They are cheap.
Psssh! Rosie O'Donnell will never join the military!
Where's the blimp...? Turns out it was right over the muzzies' heads for the last MONTH..!
A powered, remote-controlled blimp carrying the Predator UAV's sensor package (plus perhaps a rack of Hellfires as well), would come in handy on the mexican border. Probably the Iraq-Syria and Iraq-Iran borders as well.
I'm really not sure they are so necessarily vulnerable at that. Depending on the threat level they could vary their altitude according to time of day, cloud deck, etc.
Heavy AAA would put em down easy, but I doubt they would have much IR signature. Guerillas, terrorists and drug smugglers/coyotes tend to be a mite short of medium-to-large radar-guided SAM's and big guns. Mere bullet holes could not hope to deflate them quickly enough.
There are also the family of solar-powered, ultra-high altitude remote-controlled blimps. Operating even above SR-71 levels.
The loft for SBD's just out is something like 45 miles, and a B-1 can carry 216 of them. How many could a stealthy blimp carry..? 500? Can you imagine that thing floating around at night above a battlefield? Or the southern border?
Just pulled this from another site ..... 160 tons is something like 640 SBDs ... doesn't give a max altitude but here's the size ot it.
The blimp will be 853 feet (260 meters) long, with a maximum diameter of 213.25 feet (65 meters).
So something on the order of a large sized WWII aircraft carrier.
GOVERNMENT ORDERS SPY BLIMP
Friday, June 16, 2006 - FreeMarketNews.com
The government has hired defense subcontractor Lockheed Martin to design and develop an enormous blimp that will be used to spy on Americans, according to the Athens News. Government agencies such as the NSA are anticipating that as early as 2009 the blimp will be operational and begin supporting new ways of monitoring everything that happens in the country.
A prototype of the blimp is already being developed at a cost of $40 million. The spy ship, called the High Altitude Airship, will be seventeen times larger than the Goodyear Blimp and hover 12 miles above the ground. Although it is very large it will be invisible to both the naked eye and ground radar because of its distance from the earth. Fuel economic and self sufficient, it will be powered by solar energy and will be able to fly for years at a time.
The U.S. Army Space and Missile Defense Command has already conducted a study to determine some of the uses of the spy ship. It has the capability of monitoring an area 600 miles in diameter at a time with surveillance equipment, such as high-resolution cameras. The government has ordered 11 of them – enough to monitor every parcel of land in the U.S.
Staff Reports - Free-Market News Network
http://www.freemarketnews.com/WorldNews.asp?nid=15095
Yeah,
What with the hydrogen economy...
I first read about those a few years ago (on FR, where else?). I though at the time that they would be great to use when short span bridges need to be built without too much disruption of traffic.
Stop traffic, drop the old bridge (or even lift it out), drop in the new bridge that had been built elsewhere. It might be possible to get the whole thing done in a weekend.
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