Support Rising for Near-​​Space Blimps

Good news, blimp boys: the Air Force is slowly start­ing to line up behind a plan to put air­ships on the edge of the atmos­phere.
According to Inside Defense, a 90-​​day Air Force study has con­cluded that there would be “mil­i­tary util­ity” in putting blimps, bal­loons, and drones in near space — between 65,000 and 350,000 above sea level. Up there, they could serve as cheap sub­sti­tutes for satel­lites, relay­ing com­mu­ni­ca­tions and snoop­ing on foes. They might be able to carry equip­ment, effec­tively becom­ing giant U-​​Hauls in the sky. And this could be done, at least in the bal­loons’ case, with­out “sig­nif­i­cantly strain[ing] exist­ing infra­struc­ture or requir[ing] large amounts of equip­ment or per­son­nel to oper­ate the bal­loons,” Inside Defense says.

The Air Force has con­ducted a num­ber of near space demon­stra­tions in recent months. Three tests, car­ried out last November, December and January, placed tac­ti­cal radios on bal­loons, which then oper­ated between 65,000 and 80,000 feet above sea level…
In March, the Air Force Space Battlelab con­ducted a proof of con­cept demon­stra­tion for a radio relay sys­tem with Combat SkySat I in Arizona. That [sys­tem] can now be used in the­ater oper­a­tions [places like Iraq, in oth­er­words].
SkySat II, which the ser­vice hopes to test in FY-​​06 [fis­cal year 2006], will demon­strate a pay­load return sys­tem. Such a sys­tem would per­mit heav­ier, more expen­sive and more sen­si­tive pay­loads than were placed on the SkySat I, which uti­lized pay­loads that were destroyed after leav­ing the cov­er­age area.

May 31st, 2005 | Planes, Copters, Blimps | Comments Off Both comments and pings are currently closed.