| Submit your comments on this article |
| Home Front: Tech |
| The Be-All Blimp |
| 2004-05-01 |
| EFL High-flying technology is going back to the blimp. Engineers are developing a new breed of buoyant airships to follow hurricanes, act as mobile cell phone towers, spy over hostile territory and track incoming missiles. Unlike blimps that hover above football stadiums, the High Altitude Airship flies without a pilot and can soar literally out of sight - so high it can’t be seen by the naked eye. But will it be high enough to avoid the Pakistani attack kites? ``The prototype is expected to fly in 2006,’’ says Cary Dell, a spokesman for Lockheed Martin Corp., the ship’s builder. ``And, yes, it will be large.’’ Five hundred feet long and 150 feet wide, the craft is more than twice the size of the 200- foot-long Winstar Airship, the largest blimp in the air today. At 5.2 million cubic feet, it will be 25 times larger in volume than the Goodyear blimps. Blimps differ from rigid airships in having no skeletons. The famed Hindenburg zeppelin, which caught fire and exploded over New Jersey in 1937, was a rigid dirigible. Modern blimps are giant balloons with heavy duty skins filled with inert helium. Hydrogen is flammable and no longer used as a buoyancy source. The military has big plans for the high-flying blimp, one reason officials expect it to see extensive funding. The U.S. Missile Defense Agency awarded a $40 million contract to Lockheed Martin to design and test the prototype. The craft could be used as a surveillance platform over hostile territory, although its size and sluggishness - a top speed of 80 mph - might make it seem a vulnerable target. But parked 12 miles up, about 65,000 feet, the blimp would be ``immune to most ground-launched missiles,’’ according to Lockheed Martin. Onboard sensors will be able to detect missiles for 350 miles in any direction, allowing it to identify incoming threats. A fleet of 10 could provide an early-warning curtain for the continental United States, say officials with the Missile Defense Agency. A squadron of airships would provide ``overlapping radar coverage of all maritime and southern border approaches to the continental United States,’’ according to the North American Aerospace Defense Command. A big advantage of the blimp over unmanned aerial vehicles is its ability to linger over an area for days, weeks or months. This makes it a valuable option to expensive orbiting spy satellites, which must take pictures of a target or region as they pass overhead. ``The whole point of the thing is it’s superior to satellites for some applications,’’ says John Pike, director of GlobalSecurity.org, a Virginia- based nonprofit group that focuses on defense and security issues. ``The advantage is you can have persistent surveillance with it over a certain area. Surveillance satellites, on the other hand, spend most of their time in the wrong place.’’ The craft will hover above the Earth’s jet stream, a current of fast-flowing air found at altitudes of 25,000 to 48,000 feet and with winds that can reach 300 mph. But the jet stream will be the least of its problems, Pike says. ``It’s not a particularly friendly environment up there,’’ he says. ``It’s cold, and there’s intense ultraviolet light at that altitude, and these things can do unpleasant things to materials.’’ |
| Posted by:Super Hose |
| #4 Okay, Valentine, point taken, we'll only use the blimps in the hunter/killer rolls. |
| Posted by: Shipman 2004-05-01 5:11:30 PM |
| #3 Long story actually Stephen. To summarize, problems kept arising for ballast during take off and landing (lets say you used water or sand for example). As you were loading or unloading the ballast had to be unloaded and loaded at the same rate in order not to have the blimp tear its moorings off and go sailing straight up. When you're talking about several thousand tons of cargo this a LOT of sand/water we're talking about, but in essence this was just one of the problems that kept cropping up. Another was helium or hydrogen leakage based on which design you went with. And even FUEL and power generation (while fuel consumption would stay relatively flat over time, this was based on the assumption that there would be relatively little headwinds encountered). Mainly these problems were noticed if the airship ever encountered cyclonics or harsh headwinds. At an average speed of 100km/hr any major headwind would drastically reduce the blimps speed and increase power consumption. Then finally you encounter the payload to speed ratio which directly affects cost and revenue generation. Essentially what it ended up showing was that running an airship costed roughly 50-150% more than running even a 747 (one study showed that it costed roughly 21.6 cents per revenue-ton mile for the 747 vs 35.7 cents as a lower bound on the airship, even though the airship was given a larger payload). The speed issue still is what kills any airship cargo transporter idea for mass amounts of airships. About the only way for the airship cargo conveyer idea to survive right now is if it gets military funding. |
| Posted by: Valentine 2004-05-01 4:13:49 PM |
| #2 I have often wondered why Army never pushed for cargo blimps.A blimp carrying a container w/6-8 M-1s could easily cruise at 120mph-5,6 times faster than oceanic transport,and not requiring a long runway like conventional a/c(C-17 only carries 1 M-1).Build a dozen or so,store all but 1 or 2.Rotate 1 or 2 thru storage and flight status to keep aircrew current.In emergency take from storage,fill 'em up and have the capacity to land a battalion of armor anywhere in world there is flat surface.Airdrop/helo in tank crews.If containers are pre-wired(collapseable for storage)add power and have an HQ/med/barracks/etc. building. |
| Posted by: Stephen 2004-05-01 3:04:06 PM |
| #1 When other kids were drawing ME 109s with 18 machine guns spewing hot lead I was designing a line of fighting blimps. Main armourment was a 32 ft. long stainless steel nose needle backed up by a pair of semi-automatic blunderbusses. Singnals were by flag only. It were a stately ballet o death. |
| Posted by: Shipman 2004-05-01 11:28:00 AM |