The Hindu : Airship developers seek Indian partners

Online edition of India's National Newspaper
Saturday, Jul 19, 2003

National

National

Airship developers seek Indian partners

By Anand Parthasarathy

A concept of the prototype stratospheric airship now being constructed in the U.S. and offered to Indian agencies for techno-commercial participation.

Bangalore July 18. Indian partners in Government and private sectors are being sought for a daring initiative to revive balloon-like airships as unmanned platforms for a variety of military and civilian applications.

The U.S.-based StratCom International proposes to build stratospheric airships, nearly 200 metres long, that will hover 20 km above the earth, move along straight lines if required, navigate by satellite and carry about 2 tonnes of payload.

These could be a variety of sensors for remote sensing and surveillance, or `antenna farms' for telecom and cellular communication applications.

Stratcom has received U.S. Department of Defence funding exceeding $ 100 million to make the first prototype by the end of 2005, but a number of civilian payloads will also be included in the first tests.

Lt. Gen (retd) James Abrahamson, Chairman of Stratcom, a former fighter pilot and a key member of the Space Shuttle and Star Wars programmes, said here on Thursday that the company was seeking both customers and collaborators in India. He felt Indian Space and aerospace agencies had much to contribute by way of payload development expertise and could be ``in a leadership position in the project. India has both the challenges and the capability suited for an airship development.''

Lockheed Martin has been retained by Stratcom to build the engine of the airship that will use helium as the gas to keep it afloat in Space. Flying much lower than geostationary satellites and higher than most aircraft, the airship would be an ideal vantage point to cover a swath of about 450 km on earth.

Over big metros, it could serve a population of nearly 1 million as a giant telecom antenna, but it was equally useful to provide service in sparsely-populated areas where normal ground communications do not exist. The prototype was designed to fly for at least 5 years without break using power supplied by solar panels. It was reusable. While Gen. Abrahamson stressed the civilian applications in his presentation today, a sprinkling of Indian defence experts in the audience were speculating that a platform like this would be ideal for monitoring cross-border activity over long stretches of 200 km or more with an accuracy that satellites cannot provide.

Indeed Gen. Abrahamson agreed that there was interest in the U.S. military establishment primarily because such an `eye in the sky' was ideal to monitor huge sections of the coastline for possible hostile sea traffic.

Dr. K. Ramchand, former Director of the Centre for Airborne Studies (CAS-DRDO), in his opening remarks, said the strato-airship ``will be a force multiplier''. Two hundred years after the first hot air balloons were lofted, it seems, science has come full circle: This old technology that pre-dates all other forms of manned flight, seems set for a new lease of life.

Printer friendly page
Send this article to Friends by E-Mail

National