It’s 370 feet long and by next year, it will house a supercomputer and surveillance equipment to allow it to look over the Afghan battlefield, 36 square miles at time – from a height of 20,000 feet+. Since it moves slowly, and doesn’t just fly over quickly in a pass, it’s going to be quite useful. It will probably help the US military achieve something called air supremacy.

This is one of two mega-airships that the military is funding thanks to a $211 million dollar investment. How long before Big Brother decides to park a few of these over your city to act as the eye-in-the-sky?

[via Wired]

A fleet of these blimps will be made for Discovery Air Innovations. At a cost of $40 million each, they won’t be cheap. The blimps use a mix of non-flammable helium and air to fly, and their design makes for a soft landing pretty much anywhere. They’ll be able to haul up to 50 tons of cargo each, so it should get pretty useful since the remote parts of the Great White North they plan on using these for have few roads and limited access for vehicles.

These airships will have a maximum speed of 115mph, so they aren’t slow by any means. Assuming the deal closes between the two companies in 2012, the first airships should arrive in 2014.

[CBC via Ubergizmo]

Lockheed has said that at 32,000 feet the airship had some sort of issue and had to return to a “predetermined location” for landing. Either the person that determines the location for landing needs to be shot or there was nothing predetermined about where the HALE-D ended up.

The airship “landed” in a heavily wooded area in Pennsylvania. The area is apparently so densely wooded that Lockheed is working to figure out how to get the HALE-D back. The aircraft is said to be undamaged and no injuries are reported. The goal of the program is to create an airship that can hang in the air 12 miles above the ground with surveillance capabilities like a satellite at a much lower cost.

[via GizMag]

I’ve read about robotic blimp drones before, for military usage and in science-fiction, but it’s somewhat odd to see the concept used like this. The blimp also keeps track of the weather and other data so that you can remember everything about the environment when you later view the footage on your favorite social networking site.

The SEED can also act as a personal navigation device, projecting directions to a location of choice, and then guiding you along the route.

Click to View Embedded Video Clip

I’m sure that parts of this concept will be made or already exist, albeit for military purposes, in order to create a low-cost flying drone. Actually, you could probably SEED a theater of war with these to get full sensor coverage. It would probably be much cheaper than deploying satellites.

[via Yanko Design]

Yep, the US had airships back in the 1920s and 30s. The Macon served in the US Navy before going done in a storm in 1935. Jack’s model has a structure that mimics its 785 foot-long bigger brother. He used balsa wood sticks and Mylar for the skin of the airship, then filled it with helium, just like the original. His replica is RC-controlled and he hopes to donate it to the Moffett Field museum, where the original was docked. Jack is a retired computer engineer and saw the Macon regularly on his way to work.

It’s not just because of Fringe that I like airships – ever since James Bond’s A View to a Kill and the Indiana Jones movies, you wonder why airships haven’t become popular again. Maybe because they travel slower than some people expect. I, for one, hope that we’ll have mainstream airship transportation soon again.

[PopSci via DVice]

Created by a group of students for Simon Fraser University’s School of Interactive Arts + Technology (SIAT), the weBlimp is a remote-controlled flying machine that’s driven through crowd collaboration. A camera and audio sensors installed in one room react to the crowd’s movements and convey those to the blimp’s flight controls in another room.

According to its creators, the weBlimp’s control mechanism “conceptually miniaturizes participants and places them inside the gondola of a remote controlled blimp.” As you can see by the video below, it’s really a pretty ridiculous way to control the thing, and produces what I wouldn’t call the most controlled flight you’ve ever seen. But it still looks like fun.

Click to View Embedded Video Clip

At least they didn’t fill their airship with hydrogen, cover it with highly flammable paint then hit it with some static electricity.

[via GreenDiary via NOTCOT]

The project proposes a 300-meter, helium filled banana floated skywards, to hover over the Lone Star state. Artist Cesar Saez claims to have raised tens of thousands of dollars towards his goal of $1 million that will be needed to launch his work, entitled Geostationary Banana Over Texas.

Why, you may ask, would you spend taxpayer dollars to launch a giant fruit into space? According to the artist, “Texas is as symbolic as the banana… The banana has a lot of symbolism: phallic, humour, and political, too.” If that’s his only criteria, why not launch a giant penis into space?

[via TechDigest]