Coming soon to an airspace near you: not quite a zeppelin, not quite a blimp, but a high-flying green spying machine.
Earlier this month, the Pentagon announced details of a plan to spend $400 million on a giant, fuel-cell-powered airship that could hover above the Earth for 10 years at a height of 65,000 feet.
"It is absolutely revolutionary," Werner J.A. Dahm, chief scientist for the Air Force,
told the L.A. Times about the airship. "It is constant surveillance, uninterrupted. When you only have a short-time view -- whether it is a few hours or a few days -- that is not enough to put the picture together."
According to the original article, by the Times' Julian E. Barnes:
The dirigible will be filled with helium and powered by an innovative system that uses solar panels to recharge hydrogen fuel cells. Military officials said those underlying technologies -- plus a very lightweight hull -- were critical to making the project work.
"The things we had to do here were not trivial; they were revolutionary," said Jan Walker, a spokeswoman for the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency [DARPA], the Pentagon's research arm.
The blimp, known as ISIS (for "Integrated Sensor Is the Structure"), is not currently under development, but the Air Force has a contract with DARPA to have a demonstration ship afloat by 2014.
