Colossal spy airships with 15-story radars get $400M reality check

[n2doc]

Colossal spy airships with 15-story radars get $400M reality check
By Layer 8 on Tue, 04/28/09 - 11:15am.
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Military scientists this week got the go ahead to build a roughly 1/3-scale model of a stratospheric airship that if completed in-scale will basically house a floating 15-story radar system capable of detecting and tracking everything from small cruise missiles and unmanned aerial vehicles to soldiers and small vehicles under foliage up to 300 kilometers away.

The model is no slouch either and will consist of an airship containing an X-band radar system that will be roughly 100 square meters in size (half the size of a roadside billboard) and a UHF-band system that will be approximately 600 square meters in size (roughly equivalent to the size of a soccer field).

The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) awarded Lockheed Martin Aeronautics a $400 million contract to design, build, test and flight-demonstration of the 1/3-scale airship that will be large enough to validate manufacturing and calibration for the objective system and will provide an early glimpse of the air and ground target tracking performance possible with an operational system. Demonstration flight tests are expected to occur in FY 2013, Lockheed said.

http://www.networkworld.com/community/node/41368

[rcrush]

1. Great

[TheWraith]

2. I wonder how hard it would be to shoot down.

Probably not $400 million worth of hard. Still, it sounds like a damn cool system.

[Vidar]

3. Could be taken out by a high flying, brick-throwing alien in an air force weather balloon.

[TreasonousBastard]

4. Half a billion for the prototype, which will...

have overruns at least doubling its cost.

Then what? We need 10 of them at 750 million each? With overruns, that's 2 billion each and they still won't work.

Whatta deal!

[dkofos]

5. That's another $400 million wasted. Or should I say $1.2 trillion after cost overruns

are figured in.