Slashdot Mirror
Airships Tested As Two-Way Telecom Beacons
sgups writes "The Toronto Star (no registration required:)) is reporting about this firm which will supply spherical airships that will be used as high-flying telecommunications platforms to supply two-way Internet access across the United States and into Mexico and Canada. The article explains little of the technology though."
the airship explodes cause it was filled with hydrogen & millions of internet weenies are left stranded with no pr0n
You tried your best, & you failed miserably,
The lesson is:
Never Try
High speed internet access for those of us who live out in the woods would be great, since sattelite is incredibly expensive...
As long as they don't get shot down as UFO's....
~The Incredible Xan~
"Saying that men can't be lesbians is gender discrimination."
Now the government can use the airships as excuses for what you "really" saw in the sky at night, not a UFO. Good bye weather balloon excuse.
What about the same solution as an alternative to Cell Phone towers?
Of course, if they succeed, we'll have big potatoid wafers the size of dinner plates.
Stefan
In order to reach the same coverage area as the 10 Stratellites, the company would have to install wireless equipment in more than 14,000 cellular towers at a capital cost of $56 million plus annual tower lease cost of $67 million, Lively said.
The new United States Homeland Security agency, created in the wake of the September 11 terrorist attacks on New York and Washington, wants telecommunications around major cities improved, and companies have been scrambling to find alternatives to cell towers and landlines, Colting said.
Great, they want reliability in case of a disaster so they think combining 14,000 towers into 10 big balloons is going to be better. Might not be a single point of failure.. but I'd prefer 14,000 points of failure rather than 10.
You thought right, but think wrong.
.bomb years had a ton of people trying to sell shit that will become common place in the future. They were just too early .. technology and markets both have to hit puberty before people stop snickering.
... there are huge differences between today and 1998.
.. and the news is especially interesting given how tentative companies are to spend on this sort of thing today. Must have been a dam convincing test flight.
The first ones usually tank. Than somebody finds the magic pill, and voila.
The
Christ, I can't believe how many people sound like they switched their 1998 office chair for a 2002 rocking chair
Read the article and you'll note there is a sale in there. Hard to tank when your clients actually have the money to pay up these days (or youre not being paid in stock.)
"Old man yells at systemd"
"spherical airships"
The Hindenburg and Goodyear blimps ruined the good name of blimp forever. Now were are reduced to puzzling out such obtuse synonyms as "spherical airships".
Sure, you can put balloons up there, but there are factors such as weather, acts of God...
snipers.
"The Toronto Star (no registration required:)) "
What? Registration not required? What am I supposed to bitch about now?
Well, hell, guess I have to read the article now.
*SIGH*
Sent from your iPad.
You can find more information on the spherical communication technology of airships at this site.
Oh, wait, that was communication technology of spherical airships. That information is found here.
1. Denial of service
2. Fried router
3. Blimp attack
I'll form my OWN solar system! With blackjack! And hookers!
What about power requirements? Staying in the same position requires some power. There are also other power issues I', Sure.
Cy
http://www.dfrc.nasa.gov/Projects/Pathfinder/
or search for "Nasa solar-powered Pathfinder" in your favorite search engine.
This is a solar-powered drone that eventually will fly 24 hours (carrying batteries for night).
Spherical airships running on Volkswagen engines for the transmission of spam and pr0n. Hmmmmm...I've had ideas like this before. Usually after several bong hits....
Whats the liability if one these ships crashes? They are going to be over heavily popullated areas. Seems like a big disaster waiting to happen.
Have you ever been to a turkish prison?
GNU terrorists have hijacked the WiFi blimp and have already bounced into Microsoft's headquarters five times.
__ Someday, but not this morning, I'll finally learn to use the preview button.
RTA: they are putting these up in the stratosphere which is above the part of the atmosphere where weather is a problem.
-- the cake is a lie
>>The Stratellite, which will be about 80 metres in diameter, is similar to a satellite, but it is stationed in the stratosphere at 19,000 metres rather than in orbit.
Maybe this sounds like a dumb question, but how do they plan on keeping one of these things in place? With an 18,000 foot cable? With some type of gyroscope mechanism?
Wouldn't the wind(and changes in air pressure) move the thing around like a, uh, baloon?
Forgive me, but I don't know that much about high altitude baloons. But I know that if the wind down here on the surface can rock my 2 ton truck around like a lego toy, it would probably do a number on a baloon in the upper atmosphere.
Huh?
The new homeland security department will require a massive global network. But transoceanic fiber is easily cut and the $800 million TDRS replenishment program with three satellites doesn't have the bandwidth. Intercepted SIGINT data is reportedly transmitted to Earth on a 24 GHz downlink using narrow-beam antennas. But the frequency swaths allocated for links are less than consumers can get on cable television. More bandwidth is needed.
One might speculate that a secret optical/IR satellite network downlinked in Hawaii might be developed. The European Space Agency, not to be outdone, says they're thinking of building miniaturised optical systems that fit onto a microchip. These optical networks might use optical CDMA which encodes each pulse,across a segment of wavelengths.
Although I hesitate due to the high liklihood of it being Slashdotted, the company's homepage has a pretty cool picture of the device in question. While the most of the comm gear is hidden within, you can see some antennae's and solar panels on the side. The rest of the site has lots of other interesting pics, but like the article is unfortunately very short of any tech detail. :-/
OK, there's no weather in stratosphere, but you're closer to God ... :-/
Escher was the first MC and Giger invented the HR department.
--I've seen several slashdot threads now on starting your own business, moaning about the company you are in, etc. The two recent were the tech trends thread and the hilarious wobbly headed CEO doll "bonus". Anyway, I found the most fascinating thing in the article was that, to the owner, balloons were just fun! That's how he got into it, doing what he thought was fun and cool! Fun can translate into enthusiasm which leads to making some radical but maybe cool decisions. More power to the guy, and hope he figures out how to keep them in place! And is this a new job title, certified stratonaut network administrator*? CSNA* What a job!
*copylefted, have fun!
thunderstorms in Oklahoma typicaly top out at 50,000ft however they have been known to go to 65,000 ft. 19km is 62kft. The jet stream is at the top of the stratosphere, right below the stratopause which tends to be at 150,000 ft. They have a long way to go to get out of the "weather".
However, given the current state of the telecom industry, I find it hard to believe that *any* of these projects will get off the ground (no pun intended) in the near future.
As to casting a shadow the brightness of the sky (much less the sun) quickly fades out any shadow; the same as high-flying planes don't cast visible shadows (unlike low-altitude ones near airports.)
Any environmental effects of these would be very minimal, far less then those of a conventional plane or helicopter.
I don't read ACs: If a post isn't worth so much as a nom de plume to its author then I wont bother either.
Well, it is the Toronto Star.
The Globe and Mail is read by the people who own the country. (It's Toronto's national newspaper, except for the National which is Toronto's other national newspaper.) The Toronto Star is read by the people who whine when they don't run the country. The Toronto Sun is read by the people who don't care who runs the country, so long as she has big tits on page 3. Weeklies like NOW offer insight into: politics or performance art? (With the establishment's hand up their sock-puppet bum.)
-- Adapted from Yes, Prime Minister
One line blog. I hear that they're called Twitters now.
A (small) picture of one of these ships can be found here.
Oil field trash from Africa's equitorial west coast might remember this being done over 20 years ago (by Conoco? I can't remember). The company needed communications into the jungle, and the anchored dirgibles solved two problems...
1. They didn't have to cut a path for wires
2. They could avoid the natives stealing the wire.
The problem came in the first monsoon season when , although very heavily anchored, the coastal one was blown hard enough to snap the dirgible from the cable. The cable bounded back like a rubber band, and completely demolished the base station. Tons of thick steel cable flying out of the sky. I wish I could have seen it.
(My dad, now retired from Mobil, told me this story some years ago.)
The spherical airship is filled with non-flammable helium and has no external gondola for crew. Instead, the pilots sit in an igloo-like cabin inside the sphere.
:)
If it leaks, the pilot will get a rather squeeky voice.
Pretty much everybody in this thread has these definitions screwed up.
Aircraft are divided into airplanes, rotorcraft, gliders, airships and balloons.
An airship is sustained by a lighter-than-air gas and has mechanical propulsion; a balloon is sustained by a lighter-than-air gas and has no propulsion of its own.
Airships are divided into dirigibles (synonymous with zeppelins) and blimps. Dirigibles have internal frames for rigidity; blimps have only the internal gas pressure for rigidity.
There has never been a spherical airship before, and I'm somewhat at a loss as to why anyone would build such a thing; controlling it would be a bitch. So if these things do come to pass, they will be sui generis.
The word "dirigible" causes some confusion, because it does indeed mean steerable in Latin, and blimps are certainly steerable; however, the aviation community decided to use "dirigible" as a synonym for "zeppelin" back when World War I had made German names unpopular. The Hindenburg was a dirigible/zeppelin; Goodyear has blimps.
rj