Lockheed's High Altitude Airship

swordboy writes "Lockheed Martin has just awarded a contract to UniSolar Ovonic regarding development and delivery of flexible, lightweight solar cells for the U.S. government's High Altitude Airship security project. The proposed 500-foot-long dirigible is to fly at a stratospheric 70,000 foot altitude - above both jet stream and severe weather. The thin-film solar technology, although low in peak conversion efficiency, can potentially deliver a whopping 2500 watts/kilogram. This is the same technology as the previously discussed GE organic LED project - just with the physics in reverse. Broadband communication blimp, anyone?"

Comments

Re:Taking the place of Satellites?

[(54)T-Dub]

From one of the articles

According to the North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD), 11 high-altitude airships would provide overlapping radar coverage of all maritime and southern border approaches to the continental U.S., and may be a significant asset in homeland defense efforts. The Stratospheric Platform System (SPS) dirigible operates just barely within the outer limits of the earth's atmosphere and is emerging as part of the military's 21st century transformational mindset.

Satalites can't provide the radar coverage that these blimps can.

Also Geo-syncronous satalites have to placed very high in orbit around the earth to stay in one spot with using a lot fuel. This causes a significant delay in transmission time to/from the satalites. The blimp would eliminate that.

Broadband Blimps!

[MooseByte]

Now if they could just stick some broadband transceivers on the thing....

Satellite service is my only option (until bb-over-power-lines succeeds), but the built-in latency of the roundtrip to geosynchronous orbit makes it useless for realtime, and the crippled upload speeds makes it useless for teleconferencing.

Shouldn't be too hard to add a motor and SNR tracker to have a dish follow that thing around the sky....

Alternate uses: Cell towers and surveillance

[Chairboy]

Two logical uses I can see are as replacements for cell towers. One of these could potentially offer as much coverage as many cell towers at a small fraction of the cost. The immediate followup thought is that this would break down barriers to high speed broadband too. At 70,000 feet, it could be an effective 'last 13 mile' solution. (har har)

Another use for the tinfoil hat & central government crowd is surveillance. Put high resolution cameras in place and you could have low cost monitoring of everything from:
- Fires
- Traffic jams
- Speeders (digital VASCAR, anyone?)
- Traffic patterns
- Police tails of vehicles under investigation with no possible detection ...and more.

Re:Taking the place of Satellites?

[MarsDefenseMinister]

It's also a lot easier to replace a blimp than a satellite.

Re:Taking the place of Satellites?

[Short Circuit]

Not only that, you won't have shrapnel occupying the former "orbit" of a blimp.

Re:easier to take out ?

[shokk]

Or more importantly, over border areas to give "over the horizon" view at ground targets for ground forces. At 12 miles up and 100 miles away, how many 3rd world ground forces are even going to spot it, much less shoot it down? Imagine all the advanced optics you can't put onto a Predator, and now only available on spy satellites, loaded onto this baby and you've got a nice spy platform.