Tag: BLIMP

Share The U.S. Air Force is developing a $211 million surveillance mega-blimp, which, if completed, could stay in the air for a week and will be seven times larger than the Goodyear Blimp. The project, dubbed 'Blue Devil,' could change the way surveillance missions are carried out in Afghanistan by serving as a floating information hub, according to Wired. The 350-foot-long blimp could ascend as ...

For the art.tech group exhibition currently on view at The Lab in San Francisco, artist David Bowen contributed a dynamic work called 'Fly Blimps' -- a trio of small, helium-filled dirigibles controlled by those pesky members of the order diptera. Sensors are embedded inside the flies' small chambers, each of which contains food, water and light. As the swarm, which includes up to 50 houseflies, ...

We've already told you that the world's largest airship, called the Bullet 580, will depart on its maiden voyage later this year. Now, according to Inhabitat, the world's first solar-powered blimp is set to take flight over the English Channel as early as next week. The helium-filled Nephelios, which measures 72-feet long and 18-feet wide, is covered with a strip of semi-flexible solar cells. ...

Share Oh, the humanity! The world's largest airship, called the Bullet 580, is set to take off on its maiden voyage later this year -- and it will do Thomas Pynchon proud. The craft measures 235 feet long by 65 feet in diameter, and reaches an altitude of 20,000 feet. The bulbous blimp can be flown with or without a crew, carrying up to 2,000 pounds of cargo and/or passengers. But jumbo-jet it ...

The Air Force has announced that it will do its part for economic stimulus by spending $400 million on a dirigible designed to float 65,000 feet above the Earth, where it will provide constant surveillance of an area (such as the Afghanistan-Pakistan border). ISIS (Integrated Sensor Is the Structure) is being billed as a cross between a satellite and a spy plane, kept aloft by helium and powered ...

Hot on the heels of the revelation that solar-powered, inflatable turtles are the future of mass transportation, Boeing is showing its vision of the heavy-hauling skies of the the near-future with its JHL-40 Skyhook heli-blimp, a craft it hopes will revolutionize the transport industry for remote, inhospitable places, like the Canadian Arctic. It is just what it sounds like -- a combination of a ...

Bizarre as it may seem, the future of air travel may lie in the past. The past few years have seen a resurgence of interest in dirigibles (like blimps) as a way or carting passengers around the world. According to a report in the Guardian, Germany is getting ready to test the Zeppelin NT -- built with an endowment left by the builder of the original Hindenburg -- by flying tourists over London ...

Long-haul airships got a bad reputation after the Hindenburg disaster, but French designer Jean-Marie Massaud seems to think that the secret to resurrecting the flying gas bags is by turning them into luxurious floating hotels. The so-called Manned Cloud, which isn't set to take flight until 2020, will cart 40 passengers around the world at a height of 18,000 feet. When completed, the flying ...