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Pentagon Seeks Fleet Of Massive DARPA Spy Blimps
Hovering 12 miles up, airships will scan vast expanses
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 The
Pentagon has announced intentions to launch an entire fleet
of giant 450-foot-long airships which will act as a massive
airborne radar system providing perpetual surveillance of vehicles,
planes and people on the ground.
The Pentagon said Thursday that it intends to
spend $400 million to develop a giant dirigible that will operate
on hydrogen fuel cells and solar panels, floating 65,000 feet
above the Earth for 10 years, reports the LA
TImes.
The airships will be around twenty times larger
than the Goodyear Blimp, giving ground operators the capability
of monitoring an area hundreds of miles in diameter at a time
with surveillance equipment, such as high-resolution cameras,
in addition to the football-field-sized radar antenna.
Although very large, the airships will be invisible
to both the naked eye and ground radar because of their distance
from the earth, hovering around 12 miles above the ground.
The craft would also operate beyond the range
of any hand-held missile, many surface-to-air missiles and most
fighter planes.
The airship, named ISIS (Integrated Sensor Is
the Structure), no doubt after the Ancient
Egyptian goddess, is being developed under an agreement
between the Air Force and DARPA, the Pentagon's semi-secret
research arm.
Werner J.A. Dahm, chief scientist for the Air
Force describes the airship as "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." Dahm said.
(Article continues below)
The Pentagon has described the project as a tool to be used
over urban battlegrounds abroad. But, like DARPA'S"Combat
Zones That See" project, there's no reason
ISIS couldn't float over major cities such as New York or Chicago
without anyone knowing.
A similar program known as WALRUS
was effectively killed off by Congress in 2006.
However, the ISIS program has been floating around (pun intended)
since 2004.
"We will apply this technology to track people emerging
from buildings of interest and follow them as they move to new
locations," announced DARPA's Paul Benda at a conference
in March 2004. "Imagine the impact it will
have if ISIS tracks the movement of individuals for months.
Hidden webs of connections between people and facilities will
be revealed."
In 2006, reports
regarding the project resurfaced as DARPA courted defense contractors
Raytheon, Lockheed Martin and Northrop Grumman to develop the
airships.
The Air Force has signed an agreement with DARPA to develop
a demonstration dirigible by 2014.
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