PENTAGON’S FLYING SAUCER

Before the Pentagon decided that it wanted to stock sol­diers’ back­packs with minia­ture unmanned aer­ial vehi­cles, or UAVs, Defense Department researchers had a slightly dif­fer­ent idea: give G.I.s their own fly­ing saucers instead.
The Multipurpose Security and Surveillance Mission Platform (MSSMP), flown from 1992 to 1998, used a ducted fan and a 50 hp engine to “cruise at speeds of up to 80 knots, for up to three hours, with a ceil­ing of 8,000 feet,” accord­ing to Helicopters​.com. Weighing at 250 pounds with a diam­e­ter of six feet, the MSSMP was meant to “pro­vide a rapidly deploy­able, extended-​​range sur­veil­lance capa­bil­ity for a vari­ety of oper­a­tions and mis­sions, includ­ing: fire con­trol, force pro­tec­tion, tac­ti­cal secu­rity, sup­port to coun­ter­drug and bor­der patrol oper­a­tions, signal/​communications relays, detec­tion and assess­ment of bar­ri­ers (i.e., mine fields, tank traps), remote assess­ment of sus­pected con­t­a­m­i­nated areas (i.e., chem­i­cal, bio­log­i­cal, and nuclear), and even resup­ply of small quan­ti­ties of crit­i­cal items,” its mak­ers at the Space and Naval Warfare Systems Center say. (These are the same wiz­ards of robot­ics that put together the ultra-​​intimidating Robart III guard drone.)
In the mid-90’s, the MSSMP appar­ently had a cou­ple of suc­cess­ful demon­tra­tions at Army posts. For exam­ple, in January 1997, the MSSMP system’s flew over Ft. Benning’s urban oper­a­tions train­ing facil­ity, pro­vid­ing “recon­nais­sance sup­port with the vehi­cle fly­ing down city streets, look­ing through upper– and lower-​​story win­dows, pro­vid­ing look­out sup­port ahead of advanc­ing troops, and per­form­ing obser­va­tions after land­ing on the roof of a two story build­ing. The vehi­cle also dropped a sim­u­lated radio relay on the top of a build­ing, a minia­ture intru­sion detec­tor in an open field, and car­ried a stan­dard Army laser rangefinder/​designator as a pay­load.“
The Army has a sim­il­iar set of tasks in mind for its fam­ily of “Organic Air Vehicles,” slated for sol­diers hands if and when the Future Combat Systems project ever comes to pass. The “Organics” rely the same, ducted-​​fan propul­sion as the MSSMP.
This isn’t the only saucer-​​esque craft the Pentagon has toyed with. In 2003, the Navy worked briefly with Russian sci­en­tists on a vacuum-​​powered, pita-​​shaped UAV. And back in the 40’s, the Navy devel­oped the Flying Flapjack — a propeller-​​powered, Frisbee-​​looking fighter plane that could take off and land like a heli­copter. Despite years of test­ing, it never got more than a few feet off of the ground.

April 7th, 2005 | Drones | Comments Off Both comments and pings are currently closed.