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Blimps To Help Protect Washington DC From Air Attack
Hugh Pickens writes writes "Reuters reports that a pair of bulbous, helium-filled 'aerostats', each 243 feet long, will be moored to the ground and fly as high as 10,000 feet, as part of a high-tech shield designed to protect the Washington D.C. area from an air attack like the one that took place on September 11, 2001. One of the aerostats carries a powerful long-range surveillance radar with a 360-degree look-around capability that can reach out to 340 miles. The other carries a radar used for targeting. Operating for up to 30 days at a time, JLENS is meant to give the military more time to detect and react to threats (PDF), including cruise missiles and manned and unmanned aircraft, compared with ground-based radar and is also designed to defend against tactical ballistic missiles, large caliber rockets and moving vehicles that could be used for attacks, including boats, cars and trucks. 'We're trying to determine how the surveillance radar information from the JLENS platforms can be integrated with existing systems in the National Capital Region,' says Michael Kucharek, a spokesman for the North American Aerospace Defense Command. Washington is currently guarded by an air-defense system that includes Federal Aviation Administration radars and Department of Homeland Security helicopters and fixed-wing aircraft on alert at Reagan National Airport to intercept slow, low-flying aircraft."
Yes, a giant ball of gas catching fire when fired upon and crashing into DC will sure help protect it.
As I understand it, we need to conserve helium. If these things are unmanned, could we not use hydrogen?
Didn't we used to call these barrage balloons?
The designers should give the blimps a dark steampunk look so that visitors to DC can pretend like they are in a euro-WWII-alternate-timeline story.
Just put a big dome over the whole place, and don't let anyone out. They can all pretend they're running the world, and the rest of us can finally be left alone to run out lives.
1984 appears to be rocketing right along as movie-turned-reality. instead of addressing foreign policy mistakes we've taken to bubblewrapping and tripwiring the nation until americans stop worrying about it and learn to love the terror
the good news i guess is DC is going to start looking a lot more like bladerunner, and if we're lucky it will mean eventually, just maybe, i can order chinese from a blimp chop suey shop like corbin dallas. :)
although im not entirely looking forward to the Judge Dredd approach to criminal justice, i am admittedly kind of excited to see the voice-activated guns and flying motorcycles
Good people go to bed earlier.
They state as fact the blimps will be deployed, but they're still "trying to determine" how they can be integrated into the air defense system? Isn't that kinda backwards?
If you weren't such douchebags to so many people of the planet... You wouldn't need to worry so hard about 'threats'...
Not being an ass is even free.
moored to the ground
They might look similar to blimps from a distance, but it sounds like they're just balloons carrying radar, not actually capable of moving around.
Yeah, because the 9/11 attacks were all about not having radar visibility of the aircraft, uh huh. Sure.
They were perfectly visible by radar.
So this is a hidden agenda (technology that will not be mentioned by them) or a complete BS example of making Americans feel comfortable, like nothing will ever happen again because they're being watched out for.
Their new fancy defence idea is...Barrage balloons.
The 1940's called, London wants their stuff back.
More waste. More welfare for political cronies. Useless as a kick stand on a bass boat.
* Carthago Delenda Est *
So rather than do the sane thing to reduce attacks (which saves money both in the short and long run!) which is to fix our foreign policy to one of free trade and friendship rather than secret assassinations, embargoes, invasions and occupation that we currently have. We instead decide to spend even more money on useless counter-measures.
An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.
Taxation is legalized theft, no more, no less.
Nice of Michael Moore and Rosie O'Donnel to pitch in.
...I can tell you sincerely that we are all fucked if we have to depend on this system.
The Internet is already ready: http://armorgames.com/play/924/balloon-invasion
Looks good.
Use non-renewable resource.
Expensive in operation.
Doesn't work though.
Yep. looks like a typical government operation.
They would not put in a huge down looking camera would they? They could track where every car has gone and zoom in on those hot tub parties.
Current satellites can see very well. This could hold a bigger camera a LOT closer.
I would like this tech in Afganistan to watch roads for IEDs. Not in the U.S. to follow suspects around.
.
San Diego Union Tribune article about an unmanned Army blimp brought down in Pa. woods A remote-controlled, unmanned reconnaissance blimp launched from Ohio by defense contractor Lockheed Martin was brought down Wednesday in a controlled descent in the woods of southwestern Pennsylvania after it was unable to climb to the desired altitude. The HALE-D blimp was designed to float above the jet stream at 60,000 feet and can be used for reconnaissance, intelligence and other purposes often accomplished by satellites, but at lower cost. The blimp was being tested as a communications relay device as part of a contract Lockheed Martin has with the Army
And another one, found by searching for military and blimps, also found in gizmag and wired, is a dedicated blimp site article about the army preparing and training for using a huge/mammoth spy blimp, an LEMV = US Army's massive Long Endurance Multi-Intelligence Vehicle:
The Air Force's highly computerized (and potentially missile-armed) Blue Devil 2 airship recently ran into integration problems, forcing the flying branch to cancel a planned test run in Afghanistan. (Although the service had never been too hot on airships in the first place.) The Navy meanwhile grounded its much smaller MZ-3A research blimp for a lack of work until the Army paid to take it over. The LEMV seemed to be losing air, too, as Northrop and the Army repeatedly delayed its first flight and planned combat deployment originally slated for the end of 2011.also http://www.gizmag.com/lemv-first-flight/22675/ ...
and http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2012/05/massive-spy-blimp : Army Readies Its Mammoth Spy Blimp for First Flight
There wass also an auxilliary naval air field north of La Jolla in Del Mar that also was used for blimps: http://www.militarymuseum.org/NAAFDelMar.html
DIE!
I'm sick and tired of elected officials thinking of themselves as a valuable commodity. They're just citizens. No better, no worse than the rest of us. They need to send a message to the "terrorists." This message should be something to the effect, "You can hurt me, kill me, do whatever you want, but know that there are plenty of other people in line to take my place."
I really do believe that the current breed of politician would make the founders of the U.S.A. sick.
all the downward-looking cameras and radio scanners.
What about the aliens?!?!? Are these blimps going to save our government from the aliens' attack that could come any moment?!?! Everyone knows Independence Day was a documentary sent back from the future to warn us!
/sarcasm
I think that their imagined threat of terrorist airplane attacks is about as likely to happen.
fly as high as 10,000 feet
powerful long-range surveillance radar with a 360-degree look-around capability that can reach out to 340 miles.
There's a simple aviation rule of thumb (aka its probably less than 10% inaccurate) that 10Kft = 100nm to the horizon.
So they're admitting its a OTH radar. That seems odd, why make a shitty lightweight OTH when you could make a really good one on the ground. In the air would be a good spot for a stereotypical skin painting surveillance radar, however.
I'm suspecting there's some specsmanship going on here were an infinite number of imperial to metric re-conversions and PR rounding up 20 times has somehow lead to the "real" range of "around a hundred miles" getting boosted to the somewhat ridiculous 340 miles.
Or they're confusing individual range with total system coverage. You only need about 3 blimps IN A SYSTEM each with 100 mile range to cover about 350 miles along the widest part of the entire system. I have to think about circle packing, maybe 3 perfectly aligned circles 100 nm apart could cover an absolute minimum diameter of 340 miles as a system. Hmm you'd be looking at the intersection point of two circles vs the farthest point of the 3rd circle or some BS, I think?
And or the journalists failed geometry and are confusing range aka radius with diameter or more like circumference. So they F'd up thinking radius is the same as circumference. Yes, literally, a 100 nm diameter radar (aka 50 mile range) can cover a ground footprint aka "radar fence" that would be a circle on the ground that would be 314 point something miles to walk around (not across).
Please no flames that an airborne radar can see an airplane at twice the horizon at the same altitude as the radar because they're both in the air... the specified security theater is to prevent another 9/11, and if the 9/11 planes were at 30Kft cruising along over NYC then 9/11 wouldn't have been much of a disaster (unless we start building 30001 foot tall skyscrapers in the future or something). The next attack will of course be highly successful because it will be different than the last attack. Generals always prepare to fight the last war. I bet the united states is perfectly prepared to defend against massed cavalry charges and musket fire.
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
How are fat people going to protect the capital?
I'm posting just to say they there's no chance they'll put something like ARGUS there just to keep a close eye on the locals. Nope. Not gonna happen.
We need to get into contact with the guy in charge of the tanks and see if they can swap the Helium with the Hydrogen.
And then of course the 'black leadership' to claim it's spying on all the 'urban' people.
is helium a scarce element (on this planet)? Why not use a different source of levitation to protect our national security? Now government can declare helium production a strategic national security interest? take it and run with it...
I'm pretty sure that London had many more than just two during World War II.
Although the intent of them was to provide obstructions to aircraft rather than trying to detect them.
Good thing no plane will ever be hijacked again. They'll either make it to the destination or explode before anyone knows there's a problem.
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
My God, the terrorists are going to employ von Richthofen! With his triplane, the blimps have no change.
I was just thinking lately, the only thing missing in the similarities between the US and 1935 Germany is a nice big Zeppelin.
This is not at all about making Americans feel comfortable.
It's about keeping their voting bloc in line.
Now I wish I was joking.
No brain, no pain.
Since China has a penchant for surfacing their apparently undetectable submarines right in the middle of our naval battle groups, we have no reason to believe that we can detect the presence of their missile subs, nor do we have any reason to believe they don't have one or more parked off the mid-Atlantic coast.
Why our Nation's capital is still in such a vulnerable position is beyond me. A place like Omaha would be much better suited, since it's deep inland, and about the farthest you can get from the border of the continental US. It makes a sub-launched cruise missile or ICBM an untenable option for attacking the Nation's Capital.
Former imagery analyst and UAV contractor here.
While I'm not denying that these aerostats are capable of floating high resolution air-search radar, etc, their purpose over in the non-war combat zones of afghanistan and iraq where I lived for 2-3 years was to loft high resolution zoom optics with an EO/IR sensor payload in order to spot shooters and mortar teams within several miles of their ground stations. Essentially it was like having a full-time predator feed orbiting your base, which was really convenient for the aforementioned purposes.
On smaller bases you would have a guyed lattice tower with a camera ball on top, on larger ones, you got an aerostat. The ground station equipment used to view and transport the video feeds was similar/identical to those used for smaller UAV systems.
Again, it's possible these will be used for the stated purpose, but if they are, it'd be the first time I've seen it done. The most advanced surface to air missile systems do not use aerostats; take a look at the Russian S-300 (SA-10/20). It uses a ground-based air search radar and a ground-based target acquisition radar. Of course, this system is designed to be highly mobile, but the terrain around DC isnt so mountainous that a traditional early warning system wouldn't suffice. Even less so a target acquisition or illumination radar, as those two systems usually require LOS to the target. Unless terrorists have learned advanced terrain-following flight profiles and can manage to fly them in a fully fueled passenger aircraft (lol). The extreme precision radars that guide anti-mortar gun systems which can shoot a softball falling at terminal velocity out of the sky are still _ground based_
Believe me, I have every confidence that Washington has managed to find a new lightweight high res radar system to waste money on.
(hint) However, I also advise that it would eliminate a lot of the troublesome FAA and national-security related regulations barring UAV surveillance of the populace if this system is considered a ground-tethered conventional surveillance camera like the ones at wal-mart, rather than a high precision aerial sensor platform, y'know, like it actually is... (/hint)
And please, please, please make the blimp look like a giant shark.
Maybe that's an acronym, something like the Sky High Anti Radar Killer?
No brain, no pain.
designed to protect the Washington D.C. area from an air attack like the one that took place on September 11, 2001
I have to wonder how blimps can prevent the collapse of a building that wasn't hit by a plane. Or protect it from thermite charges, residue of which was found at the WTC.
So how can I check whether I'm in an alternative reality when I can't depend on dirigibles in the sky any more?
Of course news about a fake are Fake News.
Thats it tell the enemy your capabilities you fucking mental rejects.
If the US was not busily engaged in wars of aggression against
countries which have never once attacked the US, then the US
would not have to take all these precautions.
I'm American, and I have seen all this shit before. I remember the Gulf of
Tonkin resolution, and I know the so-called "war on terror" is a pack
of lies generated to convince the sheep to go along with a government
policy which screws the masses and benefits a tiny number of super-rich
people, like the Bushes, Cheney, and all their swine associates.
Not all of us are sheep, and some of us know the US government is engaged
in wars which cannot be justified by any independent evaluation. But all who
live in the US are along for the ride. What most of you don't realize is that the
destination is the fall of the US as a world power. It happened to the UK,
it happened to Rome, and it will happen to the US too.
I regret voting for Obama because I thought he was not the same as the preceding
swine. I was wrong and I ruefully admit it.
I work for the company that is re-writing it. Not to worry. We're fixing your mistakes.
Hydrogen evaporates MUCH faster trough the balloon walls and therefore, operation time is greatly reduced. I guess this is the reason for using helium. Otherwise, hydrogen is much cheaper and has higher lifting power, also the fire risk is negligible.
What is this, 1940??
Zooperman
OMG! We're the other universe!
A blimp warning you won't help if Cheney is in the bunker telling the fighters to stand down.
See the Panetta testimony in the 9-11 commission report.
I find this amusing because Reagan National Airport already has one of the most restrictive air traffic patterns in the country. I can see it now, take off to the North and then do a hard bank left to avoid the No Fly Zone and the Washington Monument, then a bank right to avoid the blimp. I can see commercial pilots now having to have simulator sessions to avoid tethered dirigible avoidance. Of course this means that airfare prices will increase by 50% to cover this training.
What they're building are barrage balloons which have been used since before WWII. While mildly effective, I seriously doubt that a well heeled terrorist organization will have their own air force or cruise missiles. Maybe a rogue nation, such as the PRK perhaps but then again I'd think they'd know well in advance of that kind of attack. DC is less than 36 square miles and if all of our strategic national assets are there, then we're in deep S**T. There's lots of bureaucrats of course and Congress and their staff, but could we do without them for awhile? Yeah, I know that's wishful thinking. Does anybody in DC honestly think these Rube Goldberg devices will actually do anything or just be a giant, taxpayer funded, deficit increasing waste of money? Obviously not.
Balloons were sometimes more trouble than they were worth. In 1942 Canadian and American forces began joint operations to protect the sensitive locks and shipping channel at Sault Ste. Marie along their common border among the Great Lakes against possible air attack.[3] During severe storms in August and October 1942 some barrage balloons broke loose, and the trailing cables short-circuited power lines, causing serious disruption to mining and manufacturing. In particular, the metals production vital to the war effort was disrupted.
I'm stocking up on Jiffy Pop now and waiting for the first set of severe thunderstorms to dislodge them and then have the F16s scramble to shoot them down. Some of the debris will be flammable and will land on the South East of DC, causing severe panic and riots. I just can't wait.
As Patton said:
“Fixed fortifications are a monument to the stupidity of man.”
Even if they are fronted by balloons.
Harrison's Postulate - "For every action there is an equal and opposite criticism"
No love for my thoughtful, insightful reply? :(
In Utah, they were out in the west desert - we just figured they were monitoring us going to Nevada to support the local economy (you know gambling and buying liquor that might not have Utah tax stamps - for consumption in Nevada, honest). ;-)
http://www.deseretnews.com/article/700215819/Radar-blimp-often-seen-in-Utahs-west-desert-a-future-defense-against-stealth-threats.html?pg=all
http://www.deseretnews.com/article/700024520/Missile-detection-airship-makes-maiden-flight-in-Utah-test-range.html?pg=all
^^^ FTFY
"I opened my eyes, and everything went dark again"
still...chances are that this thing will crash to the ground and kill some innocents long before it is used to identify and thwart a foreign attack on D.C.
really...what foreign power would even consider attacking the US homeland...let alone D.C? It would mean their annihilation. this money could be better spent on improving D.C. schools.
My God can beat up your God. Just kidding...don't take offense. I know there's no God.
I see your radar blimps and raise you thousands of mylar kids ballons with foil streamers.
Where are they going to put broadcasting things around Washington at 10K feet without interfering physically, electrically, and probably other ways? Especially as they wave around in the breeze? Wouldn't it be a lot easier to build a few extra stations around the Beltway or a wider perimeter - or, hey, put them in big trucks that drive around the Beltway all day so they're harder to find . . .
These balloons are nothing new - they have them on the Texas coast and down the Mexican border, and they've been using them for decades to spot illegal flights coming out of Mexico. Look at any aeronautical chart for these areas and you'll see a circle with the warning "Unmarked balloon on cable up to 15,000 feet" or something similar (sorry, I don't have a Houston sectional to hand to check).
Oolite: Elite-like game. For Mac, Linux and Windows
...that they will accidentally shoot down an airliner.
If you need to go to DC take the train.
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
How, exactly, is Honey Boo Boo's mom going to stop an air attack?
"Lame" - Galaxar
Uh, that was Norman Mineta testamony...
http://911research.wtc7.net/essays/green/HowTheyGetAwayWithIt.html
There's been an aerostat in the Florida Keys for, what, decades? A plane ran into the cable in 2007 and crashed. Somebody must not have read the NOTAMs.
I'm just surprised it's taken so long to be added to D.C.'s layers of defense. Much better coverage than ground-based radar, and far less expensive than keeping an AWACS or E-2C in the air all the time.
The airports in the area already have radar coverage. And there are tons of aircraft flying right past DC already on their way to the airport - not 300 miles out, they're more like 3 miles or 15-20 seconds from some targets. Then there's the nearly invisible cable dangling from the sky - wouldn't want to hit that. What is the real purpose of these blimps? Either pork or birds-eye surveillance of the area or both.
before the nation's capital got its own pair of truck nuts
how many pairs of boxer shorts should you own?
At least it won't just be their own paranoia that's casting a shadow over their lives. And I bet these blimps will in no way have any cameras pointed downwards. No-sireeee-bob!
Glad to know they are wasting our tax money on their extreme paranoia! 0_o
As the US government sucks up tax dollars and gives them to wealthy PhD's in the beltway, it builds defense systems to protect itself and the government PhD's.
And so the Marxists perpetuate the rich getting richer and the poor getting poorer.
21st Century barrage balloons. Like London used during the Blitz, only with more tech. And also spy cameras. I'm sure they'll figure out a way to land and dock drones up there too.
In a show of international cooperation, the commanding officer is on loan from England: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colonel_Blimp
I assume they lifted that phrase from the Politburo or the Peoples' Central Committee. [shudder]
Fracking *might* have the unintended consequence of liberating co-habitating helium that would otherwise be held. If they're generating millions of gallons of salt and chemical contaminated water, I don't think they'll give a care about wasting helium either.
I thought it might have meant Gov. Christie was getting a new job.
Washington can be blown away, we'll be fine; It's only a psychological thing, there's no reason to protect it any more so than New York, Los Angeles, or Houston. Hell, not that I'm advocating it, but it would probably be better for the hypothetical enemy to strike D.C. and utterly stir the hornet's nest rather than destroy a valuable military target or more populated area.
For all the money spent in case something happens we could instead arm ourselves to react once a threat is perceived. If the Internet has taught us anything it's that a decentralized network is what you want -- The answer is not to protect your single points of failure, but to eliminate them before the enemy has a chance. The good news is that the population and the military are already decentralized. So too should D.C., and Wall Street be. You can't protect against script kiddies (terrorists) without wasting lots of time in a constant state of fear, making life hard for citizens on the off chance that something might happen where you expect it to.
Seems more like a defense contract hand-out to me. if they were smart, they'd run Fast Food ads on the blimps, recoup some money via advertising and make us look as ridiculous as we are.
If they made them look like the Death Star it'd be cool as hell!
Back then it was Castles and moats and guards,
Now it's Blimps, Jersey Walls, and guards.
Haven't we've learned that it's not wise to concentrate all your gov't powers in one place?
Why don't you just make D.C. less important, perhaps then the barbarians will leave it alone?
âoeFixed fortifications are a monument to the stupidity of man.â
Well, what do you propose? A mobile capital that moves around the US? Certainly would be interesting.
I'm curious that no one has mentioned the obvious cost savings this could be aimed at. This airspace is already heavily monitored by multiple air craft. If two aerostats can replace costly fuel consuming aircraft flying 24/7 this would quickly reduce the surveillance budget for this air space.
Which cost more conventional fixed wing aircraft in the air days at a time or two aerostats full of helium?
Another ISR imaging system guy here who previously worked developing NASA technologies at Wal-Mart prices relatively successfully.
I'll take it a step further and say persistent surveillance. Having real-time imagery covering square miles with sub-30cm GSD, real-time ortho-rectification, covers a targeted area in minutes including subsystems for specialized applications (target tracking, multispectral data sources, data dissemination to local, state, DHS and other authorities) are the buzzwords that get the attention of government folk with cash-in-hand. It has only recently been 'more' of a reality as the system engineering has gone through multiple development cycles. I've been out of the industry for sometime, however I keep an eye on the tech and I can say many Tier I/II contractors have these persistent surveillance systems at or near maturation.
Back in 2006, the system I worked on was spec'ed out to cover a 9-mile radius, imaged completely every 15 minutes with 45cm GSD from 12,000ft with a real-time ortho-rectification ground station (and severs) disseminating to 30 to 50 end users. Mind you it was from traditional aircraft, but it was cutting edge blue-light special.
It's not the blimp I'm worried about. It's the payload.
Wouldn't the DARPA Multipath Exploitation Radar be a user of such a blimp?..
we prefer to be called "weight challenged service-people"
-badford
Some people are already freaked that cellphones might be microwaving their brains. What are they going to think when told that "powerful" radars are bathing the entire city continually?
They're going to test them at an "undisclosed location" in the Washington, DC area. How the hell are you going to put something the size of a football field 10000 feet in the air and not have someone in the heavily populated DC metro area see the damned thing?
dicks, seriously, dicks.
I am wondering how many kinds of Optical Surveillance are also discritely attached to that thing to spy on americans in DC?