By Ann Roosevelt
Lockheed Martin [LMT] and the Army Space and Missile Defense Command/Army Forces Strategic Command (USASMDC/ARSTRAT) are preparing to fly a High Altitude Airship (HAA) demonstrator this summer that is envisioned to provide a platform for surveillance, communications relay, according to officials.
“It’s small compared to the [proposed] operational HAA but it’s still a fairly large size airship as contemporary airships go,” Ron Browning, HAA director of business development for Lockheed Martin Maritime Sensors and Systems, told Defense Daily in an interview this week. “It certainly will be bigger than any other airship currently flying.”
An operational HAA is important to the Army “to provide persistent communication and ISR capability to the warfighter,” Michael Lee, chief, Force Enhancement Branch, Army Program Manager, High Altitude Airship, USASMDC/ARSTRAT said.
The demonstrator will be about half the length of the 500 foot long full-scale HAA, which ultimately depends on the mission and payload. The demonstrator will have only about 10 percent of the volume of an operational HAA, some half a million cubic feet compared to an expected five to six million cubic feet.
The flight demonstration will see the demonstrator launched and head up to an altitude of 60,000 feet, an altitude above controlled airspace where it will experience a similar environment, such as wind, that the operational version would see at its expected altitude of 65,000 feet.
“It will be under our control throughout its flight. The plan would be to transit to a point of interest and then demonstrate some station keeping capability,” Browning said.
The HAA demonstrator will carry some combination of communications and intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance as a payload.
Should funding be available, the Army is looking at the 2011 time frame for an operational HAA.
Over time, technologies have matured allowing the lighter-than-air platforms to offer untethered persistent surveillance and other capabilities at much lower cost than some satellites or manned aircraft.
The key with any aircraft is getting the weight as low as possible, and since the envelope or the hull is the single largest piece of the airship, getting that fabric or material to a very low density while keeping its other properties such as strength and permeability, for example, was “the real challenge,” he said.
“We had to basically find a material that was substantially stronger than anything currently flying on an aerostat or Goodyear blimp-type vehicle, weigh about half that weight or half that density and yet exhibit all the other properties for materials that are exposed at 60,000 feet that at you don’t see at 5,000 feet,” Browning said. “That’s probably the most compelling advancement in terms of letting us do this.”
The other technology advancement came in the power and energy system, developing thin film solar arrays and high efficiency battery storage that leaves no carbon footprint yet has enough energy on board to run through the diurnal cycle.
Trying to get the airship flying sooner than scheduled, “we basically scaled back the prototype to a demonstrator size so that we could get something designed, built and flying in a shorter period of time,” Browning said.
The $110 million Phase 3 contract award to build the prototype HAA came around the end of 2005, under the Missile Defense Agency (MDA), Browning said.
In the following years, funding the program became difficult and in early 2008 the program transferred from MDA to USASMDC/ARSTRAT, located in Huntsville, Ala. The Army had been involved in the program all along so it was a smooth transition, Browning said.
Lockheed Martin in Akron, Ohio, received its first production contract for a lighter-than-air vehicle in 1928. Since that time, Lockheed Martin has built more than 8,000 lighter-than-air platforms.