Giant Blimp on the Rise
The idea is pretty wild, even for the dreamers at Darpa: build a giant blimp that can haul 1,800 soldiers and their gear 12,000 nautical miles, in less than a week.
But the Pentagon's research arm is serious enough about the project, code-named Walrus, to hand out more than $6 million to Lockheed Martin and Aeros Aeronautical Group to start designing the thing.
The Defense Department has renewed its interest in blimps in recent years; a pair of tethered airships kept watch over the giant American military complex near the Baghdad airport, when I was there. The "tri-phibian" (air, land, sea) Walrus is particularly intriguing because the Pentagon is trying to figure out ways to make American forces less reliant on deep-water ports, foreign bases, and billion-dollar airports to wage war. The Army's Surface Deployment and Distribution Command has its own plans for a such an airship.
Darpa hopes the designs they've just funded will lead to a small-scale Walrus, capable of carting 30 tons, by 2008, Defense Industry Daily notes. That's as much as today's C-130 transport planes. But it's only a fraction of the million pounds that the agency wants the Walrus will ultimately be able to lug around.
(Illustration by John MacNeill, used with premission.)
Post a comment
[url=http://blog.wuhan.net.cn/m/louisvuittongirl/index.html] fashion bag [/url]
[url=http://www.neeu.com/profile/?ID=100074] fashion story[/url]
[url=http://blog.sina.com.cn/louisvuittongirl]luxury goods [/url]
[url=http://bbs.yzwb.net/read.php?tid=186125&page=1&toread=1] fashion trend[/url]
[url=http://blog.focus.cn/myblog/22371104.html] handbag story[/url]
[url=http://lala1990.blog2.cnool.net/] handbag news[/url]
Posted by: reply at May 19, 2009 08:58 PM