Michael Sirak, JDW Staff Reporter, Washington, DC
Lockheed Martin has won the US DoD’s competition to build a sophisticated next-generation airship that will provide persistent high-altitude surveillance of ballistic missiles and air threats approaching the continental US.
It could also be used in other theatres to protect US troops and allies.
The Missile Defense Agency (MDA), which oversees the High Altitude Airship (HAA) programme, selected on 29 September Lockheed Martin’s Maritime Systems & Sensors sector based in Akron, Ohio, to build the unmanned lighter-than-air vehicle over competing bids by Aeros and Boeing.
Allen Barber, vice president and general manager of Akron operations, said the airship will usher in a “new era in flight”, with its ability to loiter with a 4,000lb (1,814kg) multimission payload in quasi geostationary orbit at altitudes around 65,000ft for periods much greater than contemporary unmanned air vehicles. This could be up to a month with a planned prototype unit and approaching a year for an operational variant. Yet, unlike a satellite, the airship could return to base for maintenance.
Lockheed Martin’s highly autonomous, helium-filled design is 152.4m long, 48.7m in diameter, with a volume of 1.5 million m3, said Ronald Browning, the company’s director of surveillance systems business development.
It carries four electric motors with vectorable large twin-bladed propellers, two on each side of the vehicle. Barber characterised the airship as “a great marriage” of old lighter-than-air technologies and new innovations. The latter include high strength-to-weight ratio materials for the airship’s skin and thin-film photovoltaic cells to generate power from sunlight for the vehicle’s propulsion and the additional 10 kilowatts necessary to operate the airship’s payload.
The company is now under a $40 million contract to mature its airship design through a critical design review in mid-2004.
http://www.janes.com/defence/air_forces/news/jdw/jdw031006_1_n.shtml
Sign In
July 5, 2004 at 9:01 pm