Wired
On Tuesday, not far from the beaches of New Jersey, was a sight
hundreds of millions of dollars and years of development in the making:
the Army’s football-field-size robot spy blimp took to the air for the
first time at a military base in Lakehurst. The 90-minute flight of the
Long-Endurance Multi-Intelligence Vehicle (LEMV), manufactured by
aerospace giant Northrop Grumman and allegedly captured in the video
above, is only the beginning of a months-long test program; the
lighter-than-air ship won’t head to a warzone until next year at the
earliest. But it’s still important news. For years, the Pentagon has
tried and failed to get next-generation airships off the ground. No
longer.
“The first flight primary objective was to perform a safe launch and
recovery with a secondary objective to verify the flight control system
operation,” Army spokesman John Cummings said in a statement.
“Additional first flight objectives included airworthiness testing and
demonstration, and system level performance verification.”
“All objectives were met during the first flight,” Cummings added.
Provided further testing goes smoothly, the LEMV could deploy to
Afghanistan for combat trials in early 2013, floating thousands of feet
over the battlefield for, Northrop hopes, entire weeks on end,
scanning for insurgents. K.C. Brown, Jr., Northrop’s director of Army
programs, told Danger Room the LEMV could also pull double duty, hauling
military cargo out of landlocked Afghanistan as part of the Pentagon’s
war drawdown. It might make for quite the lighter-than-air mule:
Northrop claims the LEMV has enough buoyancy to haul seven tons of cargo
2,400 miles at 30 miles per hour.
