Lockheed Martin to build High Altitude Airship for homeland security

Isn't this the same company that brought us traffic signal red-light cameras; also known as Recalibratible Automated Traffic-Randomized Intersection Extract-Toll Systems (RATRIXS)? Is there nothing so loathsome that this company would hesitate to have its name associated with it? Forget "big brother." By looks, and design intent, Big (flatulent) Buttock (in the sky) seems a more apt description.

geocentric orbit? You mean directly above the center of the earth at all times?

rhinodrvr wrote: "geocentric orbit? You mean directly above the center of the earth at all times?"

Not quite geocentric but, as far as I'm concerned, the farther out the better. I vote for geosynchronous orbit around the newly-non-planet Pluto. Waddayasay? Who knows? Aliens could invade at any time and, Lord knows, the current regime doesn't need another NOLA moment. So what better way to secure ein falsches Gefühl der Sicherheitthan than for Führerland Security to regard all Americans as potential threats and shovel cash into the corporate coffers to make everyone feel better? That or squander good money on bad levees, yes? Besides, everyone knows L/M needs the money. Seems the graft fund is running a little low and rumor has it that even their executive dining room is forced to serve merely-14-oz. rib-eye. Times are tough all over.

Sorry for wandering a bit, rhinodrvr. These Flying Buttocks are either tethered to the ground with real strong kevlar string, like the ones that monitor the Texas/Mexico border down here using powerful Raytheon radars (Raytheon: another sad tale of corporate woe and impoverishment), or they're navigable. These cute little Piggies-On-The-Wing are not in orbit, not by a long shot, and especially not in one 24,300 miles out.

Nope. Just big, very expensive balloons bristling with spy gear. Airships, like the heading says.

I feel so safe.

-e

Not entirely new, this has been floating around (pun intended) for a few years. I saw it in Popular Mechanics at least four or five years back. At that time, the Air Force was considering it as a platform for an anti-missile laser. I was interested in it from the viewpoint of an architect, as; how do you design a space for a crew that must live in it for an entire year without relief or refueling. It would have been the Air Force equivalent of a nuclear submarine... going for months at a time completely submerged. The challenge that appeared to me, was that, though the thing is, as you say, "ginormous", the actual living space would have been much smaller than allocated in a submarine. Later articles indicated that the ship would be unmanned and automated, and then I heard nothing more of it.

Be not misled by the "ship" in airship. Where there are now autonomous buoys in non-navigable waters, there were once crewed light ships, which are no more; where light houses were once inhabited, self sufficient shore beacons now repose. But there should be no such need to "evolve" the spy blimp. Naturally, though, mags like Popular Mechanics do need to keep their artistic conceptualizers busy with something to draw. And how could they resist any ship...without action figures?

I bet they build it at the LM Michoud facility in Louisiana. Imagine that.......Katrina federal assistance finally arrives.

I knew a bipolar who, when in relapse, truly believed that the private activities of her and others was being viewed from space. After the years to dispell the belief, how am I ever going to explain (away) this spy balloon thing? Yikes.

Guest wrote: "I knew a bipolar who, when in relapse, truly believed that the private activities of her and others was being viewed from space. After the years to dispel the belief, how am I ever going to explain (away) this spy balloon thing? Yikes."

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Perhaps an apology to your friend would be more apropos than "explaining away" anything. Why? In the early 1970s I studied several photographs - photos taken from LEO (low Earth orbit) spy satellites - which showed enough detail to make The Pope paranoid (and probably for good reason in his case). In one pic, a Soviet soldier sat on the hood of a truck, smoking a cigarette and brooding over a crumpled-up map, while his two buddies lounged against the truck's front-left fender, talking. One soldier was pointing to something off in the distance. The Cyrillic lettering and the mens' uniforms were unmistakably Soviet.

I wasn't supposed to see those photographs, but thanks to someone's carelessness I found them laying on a table in a "secure, undisclosed location" (nice phrase, Cheney. Thanks). Your friend's fears were justified - at least to the extent that the technology for monitoring her activities at the foregoing level of detail was in place more than thirty years ago. Can you just imagine what might be possible today?

Hmmm... I wonder if orbital synthetic-aperture optics has improved to the point where someone might please help me find my contact lens? AT&T? Can you pass the word? I promise I'll subscribe to your long-distance services for a whole month this time.

-e