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US Pentagon Plans For a Spy Blimp
nloop writes "The Pentagon is intending to develop a new spy ship — a dirigible. At 65,000 feet it would provide a 10 year, solar power based, unblinkingly intricate and continuous view of the surface via radar surveillance. Because of its altitude it would be safe from surface-to-air missiles and most aircraft. A 1/3-scale prototype, now being designed, is 'known as ISIS, for Integrated Sensor Is the Structure, because the radar system will be built into the structure of the ship. ... 'If successful, the dirigible... could pave the way for a fleet of spy airships, military officials said.'"
China works on 'giant slingshots' armed with darts to combat the US spying mission.
This is awesome.
What's next? Will the Army start issuing "vintage" armored cars? Will there be a resurgence of interest towards lavishly carpeted submarines? Find out in the next installment of The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen!
RAID: http://www.defenseindustrydaily.com/484m-for-rapid-aerostat-deployment-system-updated-0700/
JLENS: http://www.defenseindustrydaily.com/jlens-ramps-up-hard-raytheon-wins-13b-contract-01500/
Because of its altitude it would be safe from surface-to-air missiles
The U2 went for this, and it didn't work for long. Though I'm guessing that for what is essentially a balloon with a sensor package, it's radar signature will be pretty low to start with, and extra stealth technology notwithstanding.
and I thought that model rocketry was dead.
) Human Kind Vs Human Creation
) It'd be interesting to see how many humans would survive to serve us.
Iran has announced plans to step up it's giant blowpipe development.
Because the ability to shoot things at that altitude down has not existed since the 1960's?
And at 65,000 feet, these will spy on who? I'm not really buying the "safe from missiles" claim, but even if it were true a slow moving blimp would not be very safe over foreign soil, it could even be attacked by an attack blimp with a pointed stick on the front. They claim this is a project of the Pentagon, but it sure seems like this is being designed to spy on the country's own citizens.
I'm an American. I love this country and the freedoms that we used to have.
What's this business in the article about it being "nearly impossible to see"? A 450 foot dirigible at an altitude of 65,000 feet would subtend an angle of 0.4 degrees from ground-level directly underneath, just a little smaller than the full Moon. Or will it be painted with big words on the side saying "Please ignore the spy in the sky", instructions that we all will no doubt dutifully follow, like the sheep we are?
the UAV that trumps all other UAVs. 10 year's with out having to land for refueling that is utter pwnage. you could even like launch smaller UAV's from this with weapons on them... Lasers? ...to like shoot stuff and then fly back up to the mother ship again lolz.
I can see it now... Osama is sitting out of his cave sipping a cup of tea and comments to the terrorist sitting next to him on what a nice day it is. Any how much he likes his new dialysis machine. and then ZAPP! outta the blue laser hits in in the forehead killing him and lighting the cigarette of another terrorist behind him
This only applies to existing air defense systems. There's around two dozen nations who have the capability to develop a specific weapon against such a blimp on a relatively short notice, and not all of them are US allies.
The last project trying to revive the blimp ended by having to transform the hangar into a tropical bath. Good luck.
Considering modern Mig's (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mikoyan_MiG-35) can reach approximately 62,000 feet already, having a missle go the extra distance from there would be relatively trivial. Not like this thing is going to be very speedy and even if it has no heat signature as you would expect, it still is going to be a massive not-so-moving target to hit at relatively close range...
I for one welcome our steampunk overlords.
More information via http://blog.wired.com/defense/2009/03/air-force-signs.html
Is 65,000 feet still considered withing a country's airspace? I know most planes don't go that high, but how far does a nations's airspace extend up? Clearly, once you reach "space" everyone's satellites fly over everyone else's countries, but I would think that at only 65,000 feet that would be well within a country's territory. And therefore, on grounds to be considered to be shot down.
Anyone know at what height you are in "international space"??
She spends about as much time as that blimp in the air.
I realize it's not the editor's fault this time because the original article makes the same mistake, but dirigible and blimp mean two different things. A dirigible has a support structure holding the gas cells; a blimp depends on the pressure of its gas cells to hold its shape.
"While the military says the craft is closer to a blimp than a zeppelin -- which has a rigid external structure -- officials usually call the project an airship."
Why call it an airship? They don't say. My bet is they really liked Final Fantasy.
Do you really think the Fuji one only films baseball fields and golf courses?!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mYlJ7GTtJfY
Hmm. Large gas-filled object, presumably with a not overly-thick skin to keep the weight down. Ground based laser of sufficient power to pop a hole in the giant balloon.
Yeah, this is gonna work real well.
Floating cannon battles with the Ron Paul blimp.
The engineers don't have to seem as silly now that they get to put the purestrain gold shells to good use. Hard to starboard!
Just use a laser
Tsunami -- You can't bring a good wave down!
I'd like to see some analysis about the feasibility of replacing satellites with airships in certain cases. Isn't it a lot cheaper and more fuel-efficient to put a blimp in the air as compared to a satellite? What if we could use them in place of communications satellites-- instead of satellite radio we'd have blimp radio! You'd have to do some extra work to keep the blimp in a geosynchronous position, but a comparison of the energy expenditures would be very interesting.
I wish someone would collect all the PopMech covers and publish them somewhere. Having a list of all the blimp issues would be great. You just know the Navy has refused to get rid of the hangers at Moffett simply because they knew one day Blimps/Zepplins would be back. PopMech may be correct one day in predicting the return. Even a stopped clock it correct twice a day:)
http://xkcd.com/494/
http://xkcd.com/495/
http://xkcd.com/496/
http://xkcd.com/497/
http://xkcd.com/498/
One of my all-time favorite series...
Since this thing is unmanned, why not use hydrogen and get substantially more lifting power or get the same lift with a smaller craft?
If I didn't have absolutely NOTHING to do, I wouldn't be here.
Get it right, giant kites... probably breathing fire at that.
* Winners compare their achievements to their goals, losers compare theirs to that of others.
However, by then the developers will have had the money and moved on to other projects, which is the usual way military R&D works (cynicism borne of experience).
From scarped cliff or quarried stone she cries "A thousand types are gone, I care for nothing, no not one."
I was just daydreaming about this very blimp over the past few days. Specifically, both the "solar-powered" bit and the fact that the structure will BE the dish, since you just have to make your inflated form parabolic, with the top part (due to coating on the inside) radio-reflective and the bottom part radio-transparent (except the small receiver aimed at the top part). Only difference is instead of radar going down I dreamt of a wifi downlink. Cuz' fuck you telcos and your wireless spectrum buying strong-arming - we're gonna deploy a whole free as in freedom mesh network of self-powering dirigibles and interface them with LINE OF SIGHT radar, screw you FCC. ...wait I'm just rambling incoherently aren't I?
Who is going to watch the watchers?
"At 65,000 feet ..... it would be safe from surface-to-air missiles and most aircraft."
Francis Gary Powers was shot down in his U-2 by an S-75 Dvina missile on May 1, 1960. The operating altitude for his mission was 70,000 feet. How is 65,000 safe 50 years after 70,000 isn't?
It's obviously not. On 13 September 1985 an F-15 launched an ASM-135 ASAT anti-satellite weapon from 38,000 feet and took down the Solwind satellite orbiting at an altitude of 345 miles (1,821,600 feet). The ASM-135 was built from off-the-shelf (ie. already developed, tested and in production) hardware. One can assume the shelf 25 years later to be much better stocked, and any launch platforms to be much more capable, such as the recent development of Mach 1+ missile launch capability.
With or without the "surface-to-air" in the summary replaced with "hand held" as in the original, TFA is ludicrous.
"I may be synthetic, but I'm not stupid." -- Bishop 341-B
IT's funny how the summary says "safe from SAMs", when we already learned in the Eisenhower administration that Russian SAMS can fly just as high as our aircraft can.
Safe at 60,000 feet?
I doubt it. Some modern fighter aircraft can just about reach that altitude on their own. Wikipedia gives the service ceiling of a Mig 29 at 59,000 feet, and obviously an aircraft can burst up a bit higher than that.
These blimps would just be cannon fodder.
This is my sig.
So there you go, the logical conclusion is that they want to show us the power of their throne. And that the Pentagon officials think we're all their dead husbands.
Didn't anybody watch Titanic? Thats how this is going to turn out! OH the HUMANITY!
http://www.freemarketnews.com/WorldNews.asp?nid=15095
""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."
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."
My comments:
Now, as for anyone thinking of using a plane to eyeball and shoot one of theses (11 or so) down, imagine what kind of plane and pressure suit that would be needed to survive flying along at 63,360,000 feet. I don't imagine that many countries possess ADM (Anti-Dirigible Missiles) or any capable of ASAT work, let along reaching 12 miles into the sky with precision, accuracy and the attendant lethality required to get an 80% kill probability.
So, they go from SPS to ISIS....
Previously: "Linux... Toward the Sunrise..." Now: "Linux... Toward the-- No, now, part of Every Sunrise"
I think 65,000 feet is not nearly enough. The Mig 29 has a service ceiling of 59,000 feet, and that means it can go a lot higher. In fact, you can buy a ride on a Mig 29 up to almost 70,000 feet from here:
http://rusadventures.com/tour27.shtml
That's plane is plenty capable of popping this balloon, and that's a design at least 30 years old.
No new technology is needed to shoot down dumbo blimp.
This is my sig.
Aren't blimps well known for, uh, y'know, being HUGE?
A better idea would be to create a bunch of smaller blimps and connect them together. (could also increase detail if it is done right)
Split one into 9, or 16 if you are feeling ambitious.
This also offers some redundancy if one is shot down by laser / rocket.
I see the world where a hacker may become its supreme ruler. Some serious mathematics should be involved in it though.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panopticon
Amazing the number of negative comments about this project. Maybe someone in the Pentagon reads /. and this thing will get cancelled before they find out that the blimp can also provide a cheap way to bring telecom links to remote areas.
Gary Powers was shot down in a U2 at 70,000 ft in 1960. They thought that couldn't be shot down by a surface to air missile too. 49 years later, the max altitude of a surface to air missile is 5,000 ft less? I don't think so. Balloons can go way higher than 65,000 feet, the record is 53Km, i.e. more like 150,000ft. Put it up there and it might be safe
Unicorn Setu. "Eagles may soar, but weasels don't get sucked into jet engines".
Joe Q Public: (looking at sky) "What's that? Is that a Spy Blimp?"
Man in Black Suit: No sir, it's just a UFO, now please look into the microphone."
Anyone got a light for my sig?
Ahh miniature Hindenburgs. Not only will they spy on the enemy, but they will also deal nice splash damage. This somehow reminds me of my Red Alert2 strategies. "Kirovs away!" Well on the more serious side, these seem like a relatively cheap way of surveillance. Even if they are relatively easy to shoot down, they are most likely send on places where there is no serious danger of getting it shot down. If Pentagon needs surveillance on someplace where there is a danger of it getting shot down, they wont use a blimp. (or they will send many. BEWARE of the mighty Kirov spam!)
Comsidering that an F-15 successfully shot down (destroyed) a satellite which was orbiting 555km above the Earth, the assertion that a blimp would be safe from aircraft attack is demonstrable bunk.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/F-15_Eagle#Operational_history
Moreover, a preproduction F-15 (the "Streak Eagle") in breaking its eighth time to altitude record, went from standstill on the ground to 98,425 feet (30 km) in 208 seconds, and coasted to 103,000 feet. Modern interceptors can reach such altitudes with little if any modification. 65,000 feet is within their normal operating capability.
http://www.nationalmuseum.af.mil/factsheets/factsheet.asp?id=621
Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities. - Voltaire
Laser, schmaser. Any nation with a half-decent air force could shoot this thing down. But so what? This wouldn't be deployed against such an enemy. It would be deployed against a guerilla force, which typically has no air force at all. Which, in case you hadn't noticed, includes the opposing forces in both the wars the U.S. is currently fighting.
And no, Osama bin Laden doesn't have any giant lasers, not the last time I checked.
oh, wait... kdawson...
The Cloud - because you don't care if your apps and data are up in the air.
CIA: To the Hindenpeter!
Taxpayer: How do you afford these things?!?
Who needs that, the good old Mig 21 has a service ceiling of 17500m, and its GP-9 gun pod has a known effective range of 3000m.
17500+3000=20500m, or 67,000 feet....
and that is one hell of a big target.
So it is easily hitable by anyone with even a historic jet airforce. It would be safe from foot soldiers and shoulder launched missiles.
http://members.tripod.com/YUModelClub/yugoslav_air_force/mig21/mig21var.htm
http://www.janes.com/extracts/extract/jalw/jalw2788.html
Would be just the thing for monitoring the home populous though.
http://memory-alpha.org/en/wiki/Blink_of_an_Eye_(episode)
Brief summary -
Voyager gets stuck in the night sky of a planet and creates seismic disturbances.
The planet rapidly develops technology to blast it out of the sky.
Missiles are necessary to shoot high speed targets. A stationary target can be eliminated far less expensively. :)
Leonid S. Knyshov
Find me on Quora
Not only did it fly quite high, it flew VERY Fast which made shooting it down a lot harder.
It is very hard to shoot down a Mach 5 aircraft with a Mach 4 missile or Mach 1.5 cannon, and also,
remember with the zoom manouvre, you only get one try and survive only if you are a very good pilot since your re-entry is likely flamed out due to compressor stall and in an un-gentlemanly stance eg inverted flat spin.
So this is not as safe and easy as it sounds, the pilots need to know how to recover the airframe from any/kind of spin/stall, without engine power and then do an in flight engine restart, which may require a 90 deg. dive with a fixed geometry intake.
BTW you cant eject either till you get down to c. 32000 ft as the partial gas pressure will mean that you cant even breath pure oxygen as you wait 10+ mins to get into thicker air.
Bwahaha! A $20,000 military surveillance blimp? That's rich.
Thats the sound of a really pointy thingamajig popping the side of the floating whatchamacallit. The boink! is the pointy hitting the flimsy, and the pfffffft is the sound of all the air rushing out of this idea.
There's an upside to this. At least you can visually keep track of an object floating around at 65,000ft. If it can see you, you can see it. Don't expect this thing to operate in any kind of stealth mode.
Probably better this than a spy satellite, which is hard to keep track of without having ephemeral orbital data.
Disclaimer: The opinions and actions of the US Gov't are in no way representative of those held by this author or its ci
I always thought these sorts of dirigibles would be useful in a communications network. It seems as though they could have some of the same advantages as satellites, but without the same launch expense, and with lower transmission latency.
Anybody know why these wouldn't beat the pants off Iridium, or at least provide a drop-in (float-in?) solution for battlefields, Katrina-type disaster relief efforts, or cell-forsaken geographic areas?
I guess they could spy on the communications, too. Oh, and there no doubt would be a way for advertising to get tied in. Maybe it would be a joint NSA/Google venture.
COUNTER-R3VOLUTION
Google Ron Reagan
Any country, like China, that can put a satellite into orbit, can shoot this thing down.
Sounds to me like the same imbecile that once said: "They will greet us as liberators and throw flowers at our feet"
came up with this great idea that a spy balloon floating at 65,000 ft cannot be shot down.
What could possible go wrong
"Suppose you were an idiot...and suppose you were a member of Congress...but I repeat myself." Mark Twain
Yep.....Nothing more covert than a big, black blimp buzzing around underneath a blue sky.
My favorite part: "Because of its altitude it would be safe from surface-to-air missiles and most aircraft."
-That's the same school of thought that led to the U-2 incident'.....
Knowing Google's lust for data collection, the Soviet Union is still alive and well inside the psyche of Sergey Brin....
With the history of overpriced stuff the military buys (the 900 dollar toilet seat comes to mind) one of those blimps will will likely have a cost of $20,ooo,ooo.
A radio controlled model airplane attached to a weather balloon with enough lift to carry a small explosive device could be steered toward the blimp and take it out. It's not like the thing moves fast; you could take your time getting to it to blow it up. Seems pretty lame to me.
In 1984, George Orwell wrote that you'll have a telescreen in your house, on which you'll watch television programming, but they'll watch you, too, through a built-in camera. You'll never know exactly when they're watching you, so you'll have to be careful all of the time.
Fast-forward to the present. Many computers and computer screens come with a built-in camera for videoconferencing. Instead of building blimps, which entails all kinds of costs and challenges, all they need to do is make up a law compelling every television and computer monitor manufacturer to include a built-in always-on camera that forwards video data to the government. Since this wouldn't pass on its own as a bill, all they have to do is insert it somewhere in the middle of another 50,000 page stimulus package that nobody reads before signing into law. And to make really sure that nobody notices until it's too late, that particular section of text should be formatted in Wingdings. Then, it will be, are you ready for this, in Soviet America, television watches you!
So... unless this blimp can do 120 mph on solar powered batteries it may just be blown where mother nature decides to take it.
The wind is very strong up there at times.
And what are the winds like at 65,000 feet? A cursory Googling shows they average around 60 knots and can reach 110 knots. Has anyone made a dirigible capable of even a third that speed?
A touch of eco-friendly, and a hint of innovation and change.
Somebody is trying to earn their gold star of approval from the new President.
There have been skyhook ballons since the mid 70's. One is in the Florida keys and at least one other is in west Texas. They have got loose a few times when the cable tether got fouled and broke. They were not visible from the ground but their radar signal was detectable for miles.
SpyShip jumping! Pack your sport chute, stow away, wait (quite?) a while, then fun! fun! fun!
...65,000 is well within range of surface to air missile systems from the 1950's onwards. It is also well within range of nearly all radar guided air to air missiles, many infrared active/passive missiles when carried to altitude on an aircraft, and within the service and dynamic ceilings for common military aircraft.
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Considering what a SR-71 burns in fuel just Getting to that altitude, I'd say the C.I.A. is going to be saving a heck of a lot of fuel with this blimp thing !
Sounds like the perfect disguise for keeping watch on the Super Bowl. Next Memorial Day, tell some WW2 vets in your town that the American government now plans to fill the sky with Zeppelins to spy on the citizenry. I think it might be a little too much for them to take.
Is there anything in Afghanistan worth viewing?
65,000 feet is within the engagement envelope of a number of SAMs. The weapons it flies above are the lighter, more portable weapons utilised by lighter forces, the kind the US likes to fight.
I nominate that the ISIS be named after the man who popularized the phrase.
I swear... if this blimp comes with the capability to play Beethoven's 5th or Tchaikovsky's 1812 Overture; I will GLADLY let them spy on me!
*puts on tinfoil helmet for better reception*
Oh the humanity...
The blimp might be useful much closer to home, say, over a US city. Needless to say, you won't get a chance to prevent it.
At least they have a built in naming scheme if they follow through with mass production. "Dazed and Confused", "Communication Breakdown", "Your Time Is Gonna Come", "The Lemon Song". And, of course, the one over the US Mexico Border, "Immigrant Song", and the one over Louisiana can be "When the Levee Breaks".
Do not fold, spindle or mutilate.
I could be wrong, but I don't think radar would be a very effective means of spying on the general populace...
Radar is can be very useful against ground targets:
The AN/PPS-5B Ground Surveillance Radar Set is a lightweight, man-portable, ground-to-ground surveillance radar set for use by units such as infantry and tank battalions. The radar is capable of detecting and locating moving personnel at ranges of 6km and vehicles at ranges of 10km, day or night under virtually all weather conditions.
http://www.fas.org/man/dod-101/sys/land/an-pps-5.htm
A population in a major urban area would be better tracked via people's mobile phones, but once you're out in rural areas you can easily track individual moving 'targets'. You may not know exactly who they are from radar, but you'd know they're there.
Agreed, but this also raises the question: Is there much to bomb in Afghanistan?
Those that do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it.
This is the exact same arrogant view of US technological superiority that lead to Gray Powers U2 spyplane being shot down over the old USSR in 1962.
It could monitor the war in Mexico, and let us know
when those who have killed 7000 or so people have come across the border to the north.
It could be combined with the technology to duplicate you car/house keys from a distance, just by taking a picture, and the technology to duplicate your fingerprints, and fill a database with everyone in it.
It could sit above coastlines and monitor for Tsuanami's, and warn everyone immediately by setting off flares visible to people on the ground, as well as broadcasting on radio, tv, and reverse 911 calls.
Obligatory Rathergood link http://www.rathergood.com/moon_song
Lots of funny stuff about shooting it down misses the interesting question of how to get it up. At 65,000 the air is so thin that any lighter-than-air object has to be very extremely light. After the weight of the envelope and the helium (yes, helium weighs, too) there isn't much capacity left for the radar gear, solar cells and propulsion system. The wind up there keeps blowing the thing away, so it has to keep flying, and storing enough power to keep going at night is a huge challenge. DARPA and the Air Force have been looking for ideas on this, but I haven't seen any published solutions.
Attack Blimps anyone?
What one blimp can do, another one can duplicate.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
This would be great for disaster management,
a fire or a flood, for example.
so um...Remember that one time? When James Bond was on a blimp fighting Christopher Walken? ...Yeah, that was awesome.
I think we can all agree that an airship working directly over enemy territory would be terribly vulnerable. Presumably, the ISIS would operate well behind a safety cordon of fighters the same way AWACS and JSTARS planes do.
I assume that the reason the DoD is exploring this option is the operational difficulty in maintaining multiple shifts of AWACS + JSTARS in a warzone. The airship, on the other hand, would be able to maintain its station for days on end, without the need for refueling or returning to base for a new crew.
However, a stickier problem emerges - would it be able to stay on station? According to this site: http://www.madsci.org/posts/archives/1999-09/938402041.Es.r.html, winds in the stratosphere are around 100mph. Would solar-powered engines be able to keep the airship in the same place in the sky?
This is just the U.S. military doing R & D for U.S. companies to be able to deploy cell towers @ 65K feet to cover vast swaths of rural areas for way cheaper than cell towers. Might be great for wireless cable or internet too. Just have a micro-wave link to the ground and a land-line from there. lest you think this preposterous... http://www.swissinfo.org/eng/feature/detail/Mobile_phone_airship_to_conquer_stratosphere.html?siteSect=108&sid=6873540&cKey=1152528169000