All-​​Seeing Blimp on the Rise

The prob­lem with the American mil­i­tary today is that it doesn’t have a giant, robotic air­ship, two-​​and-​​a-​​half times the size of the Goodyear blimp, that can watch over an entire city at once. Thankfully, the Pentagon’s way-​​out research arm, Darpa, is try­ing to fix that.
The pro­gram is called ISIS, short for “Integrated Sensor Is Structure.” And the idea is to park an unmanned air­ship over a hot zone for a year, at nearly 65,000 feet in the sky. Up there, ISIS can spot enemy sol­diers up to 180 miles away, tar­get tanks and trucks, and watch out for incom­ing cruise mis­siles 350 miles in the dis­tance — a “detailed, real-​​time pic­ture of all move­ment on or above the bat­tle­field,” one Darpa pro­gram man­ager says. During down times, ISIS might even serve as a cell tower in the sky, relay­ing com­mu­ni­ca­tions to U.S. troops.
But to pull it all off, almost the entire hull of the ISIS ship would have to be turned into a phased-​​array radar antenna. And that is no mean task.
To get the air­ship to fly, the antenna would have to weigh about 2 kilograms/​meter — as opposed to 20 kg/​m today. And new tricks in power stor­age will be needed, too — bat­ter­ies that can store a kilowatt-hour’s worth of juice in half a kilo­gram, instead of the 2 kg cur­rently required.
Darpa, along with the Air Force Research Lab, just handed Lockheed Martin the lat­est in a $42.5 mil­lion series of con­tracts to develop com­po­nents the uber-​​blimp. If all goes well — and that’s a big, fat if — the ISIS could fly by 2011.

June 27th, 2006 | Planes, Copters, Blimps | 1979395 Comments »http://defensetech.org/2006/06/27/all-seeing-blimp-on-the-rise/All-Seeing+Blimp+on+the+Rise2006-06-27+16%3A46%3A13david_axe You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.