IT’S A BIRD! IT’S A PLANE! IT’S A … STRATELLITE?

Ok, full dis­clo­sure: I pinched that head­line from Wired.
Engadget notes that GlobeTel Communications of Ft. Lauderdale is on tar­get to launch a pro­to­type Stratellite early next year.
GlobeTel plans a con­stel­la­tion of the air­ships–I know you did not just call them baloons–to pro­vide wire­less ser­vices like WiFi, cel­lu­lar and HDTV. GlobeTel man­aged to get The Economist to run a puff piece on the tech­nol­ogy, declar­ing the impend­ing death of the com­mu­ni­ca­tions satel­lite indus­try. Engadget was skep­ti­cal, not­ing that GlobeTel “hasn’t released any pho­tos of the air­ship” and the press release “includes the usual legalese dis­claimers about ‘forward-​​looking state­ments’. So, we may have to wait a while to see if this is real, or if they’re just full of hot air.“
The whole fiery demise of the Hindenberg–thing gave blimps a bad name, so The Economist is right to take seri­ously today’s air­ships, which bear lit­tle resem­blance to their mid-​​century ances­tors. The Defense Department, in par­tic­u­lar, is con­sid­er­ing High Altitude Airships for a vari­ety of mis­sions and devel­oped a pro­to­type solar pow­ered air­ship that can fly unteth­ered at 70,000 feet alti­tude with 4,000 pounds of com­mu­ni­ca­tion and sur­veil­lance pay­load.
There are vary­ing amounts of money in some­thing like 11 seper­ate pro­gram ele­ments in the bud­get for research and devel­op­ment for mis­sions rang­ing from tac­ti­cal com­mu­ni­ca­tions to bal­lis­tic mis­sile defense mis­sions. Airships would also be a can­di­date plat­form, along with unin­hab­ited aer­ial vehi­cles, for a con­stall­tion of “psuedo­lites” to pro­vide local­ized, jam-​​resistant GPS sig­nals. DARPA even gets a gig­gle for nam­ing its heavy lift air­ship … the Walrus.
–Jeffrey Lewis

December 18th, 2004 | Uncategorized | Comments Off Both comments and pings are currently closed.