Good article from poster wind-up on RB,
"If we're successful, in 15 years, you might not see any cell towers," said Michael Molen, CEO of Atlanta-area start-up Sanswire Technologies Inc.
Recently sold to Miami's GlobeTel Communications, the company wants to send airships 65,000 feet in the air to provide wireless phone service, high-definition television signals and Internet access. A test flight of a quarter-scale model, at 10,000 feet, is set for May, according to Molen.
In England, a public-private consortium—including British Telecom—is funding a nearly $7 million research and development effort to bring broadband Internet access to travelers and rural homes by airship or by solar-powered, ultralight planes.
Chicago Tribune ...
Defense contractors rev up for megablimps
April 17, 2004
By Noah Shachtman
Special to the Tribune
Published April 17, 2004
The old blimp-building airdock in Akron hasn't been on the cutting edge of much of anything for almost 70 years. But that may be about to change.
In the early 1930s, Goodyear Co. used the nearly 1,200-foot-long, 325-foot-wide hangar to house a set of zeppelins designed to launch an era in lighter-than-air transport.
A series of horrific crashes put those dreams to rest. Over the years, airships became little more than advertising vehicles at sporting events. Now the Pentagon has become fascinated with potential new uses for blimps—to spy on potential adversaries, transmit conversations and maybe even haul helicopters or Humvees one day.
That's given the Akron airdock, now owned by Lockheed Martin Corp., a new mission. The massive hangar is being used to put together a tethered blimp for the U.S. Army in Iraq. By June, it will be keeping watch over western Baghdad from 2,500 feet and relaying commanders' orders and insurgents' coordinates to troops in the field.
Generals aren't the only ones interested in airships, however.
Thanks to tougher fabrics, more efficient solar panels, and longer-lasting batteries and fuel cells, blimps can now hover over an area for months at a time. That durability could allow airships to essentially act as cell towers or wireless Internet hot spots—ones that sit thousands of feet up in the sky.
"If we're successful, in 15 years, you might not see any cell towers," said Michael Molen, CEO of Atlanta-area start-up Sanswire Technologies Inc.
Recently sold to Miami's GlobeTel Communications, the company wants to send airships 65,000 feet in the air to provide wireless phone service, high-definition television signals and Internet access. A test flight of a quarter-scale model, at 10,000 feet, is set for May, according to Molen.
Telecom analysts think Molen's boast is over-the-top, at best.
"The blimp idea is pretty far-fetched," said Tim Bajarin, president of Creative Strategies, a Campbell, Calif., consultancy. Companies have been flirting with the idea of broadband blimps for years, he notes, without much to show for it.
There's an undeniable logic to such projects, however. It currently costs $25 million or so to put a satellite with a 1,000-pound payload into space. Sending a dirigible up a few miles into the air should cost a fraction of that.
But after the dot-com and telecom collapse, there just wasn't the money to do the development work needed for such a system. A "wait-and-see" attitude took hold.
"There do appear to be significant opportunities in the commercial world," said Ron Browning, a business development director at Lockheed Martin Maritime Systems & Sensors in Akron. "But they want to see this thing operate before they'll commit any significant expenditures."
A number of efforts from the U.S. Defense Department—and from foreign governments as well—could provide the examples the business world needs.
For now, most military blimps are on surveillance duty. Helium gas, not engine fuel, keeps airships aloft. They can stay above a target for days and days—something not even the pilotless spy planes like Predator and Global Hawk can do.
For years, Army blimps have kept a lookout for drug runners in the Florida Straits, for example. The Defense Department is beginning research into a dirigible that can keep watch over an entire city for as long as a year.
But airships also are starting to take on a new task: communications.
"There are already all these sensors. If I can put on a transponder or two, I get a poor man's communications satellite," said Ron Hochstetler, a systems engineer with the San Diego-based defense contractor Science Applications International Corp.
In addition to providing pictures from infrared sensors and ultra-sensitive cameras, the tethered airship from Akron will give soldiers in Iraq a wireless network they can tap into. Soldiers in the streets of western Baghdad should be able to trade video and data up to 12 megabits per second.
That's about the same as the Wi-Fi access latte-drinkers get sitting at Starbucks.
But the airship has a weakness. It sits at about 2,500 feet—well within machine gun range. So a team of soldiers will have to protect the blimp, an Army source said.
A V-shaped dirigible, being planned by the Air Force Space Command, shouldn't have that problem. Designed to fly nearly 20 miles up, close to the edge of space, it would be far beyond the range of any insurgent, according to Maj. Bob Blackington.
Tests for a prototype are scheduled for June at Ft. Stockton, Texas.
Reaching such heights with an airship is only thinkable because of new, rugged lightweight materials that can withstand the pressures of the upper atmosphere. Take the Vectran composite fiber, for example. Used in ship's sails, it's about as tough as Kevlar—the stuff bulletproof vests are made of.
But Vectran is hundreds of times more flexible, helping an airship cope with the rigors of shifting pressures of the skies.
Most high-altitude airship plans count on the sun's rays for power.
The drastic improvements in solar cell weight and efficiency in recent years help make those plans more feasible.
Traditionally, solar cells have been backed with steel. New, silicon-backed models have improved watts per kilogram by threefold or fourfold. And researchers in the field think improvements of another 300 percent aren't out of the question.
All these upgrades—and more—Lockheed hopes to put on display in 2006, when it test-flies a prototype of the gargantuan High Altitude Airship. Twenty-five times the size of the Goodyear blimp, and funded with $40 million from the Missile Defense Agency, the craft is the highest-profile effort of the Pentagon's lighter-than-air projects.
The idea is for the HAA to eventually spot a missile attack from 350 miles away.
But, in a sense, the Akron airdock-built HAA is more a proof that some of the stickier problems in lighter-than-air travel can be unglued.
"The anticipation is out there that if it works well enough, a lot of companies are going to say, 'This is great. I'll order 20,'" Hochstetler said.
The helium gas inside a blimp can expand by more than fifteen times as it moves up through the skies.
How do designers plan for that?
First, the airship's massive size can account for all that extra girth, said HAA's technical director, Stavros Androulakakis.
Second, they keep the HAA's balloon filled mostly with air when the craft is close to the ground. As it rises, air is forced out. Helium from five small inner balloons takes its place.
Japan's National Aerospace Laboratory is taking a similar approach with its own dirigible project. Last summer, the lab sent a 150-foot airship into the stratosphere—one of the first times a lighter-than-air craft has reached such heights.
The launch was the latest in a series of government tests designed to culminate in a solar-powered blimp that will serve as an observation and telecom platform at 70,000 feet. The airship is expected to be ready for liftoff in 2006—around the same time as the HAA—according to George Spyrou, a consulting engineer on the project.
In England, a public-private consortium—including British Telecom—is funding a nearly $7 million research and development effort to bring broadband Internet access to travelers and rural homes by airship or by solar-powered, ultralight planes.
"There are lots of places that would like to be able to pass large amounts of data back and forth, but they don't always have the network to tap into," said Gregory Gottlieb, the managing director of the British aerospace consultancy Charles Ross Associates.
"Airships are a way to deliver a sophisticated broadband network at a manageable price."
Gottlieb cautions that such projects are still in their infancy.
But even if just a few of these experiments work as planned, the old airdock at Akron could become quite a busy place.
Copyright © 2004, Chicago Tribune
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