Lockheed Martin to develop geostationary Solar Powered Airship

This would free up some geo orbit space for future sunsats.

galileo2100

- May 1, 2009 @ 06:05 am PDT

Its about time now !! The benefits are too good to have been overlooked for long so far. This can be a good solution until the space elevator is up in another three decades.

The winners are the NEO research community. Being cash-strapped, it will be easier and affordable to deploy Telescopes and RADARS onto geostationary orbits..... they need not necessarily be in geostationary configuration. This way the HAA may be brought back to ground or repair and upgrade missions may be sent with ease every year.... all all this with existing detection technology !!

Sougata Pahari

- May 2, 2009 @ 11:05 am PDT

There are though problems with this idea.

The airships skin would have to be UV shielded as the atmosphere at that hight would provide almost no protection, decreasing life expectancy.

Closer to the Earth, so in an event of attack they could be more easily knocked out.

Decreased payload, but i assume they would be faster to construct. Atmospheric conditions would lead to slight inaccuracy's in location (no good for GPS).

And it's the wrong shape, as the stratosphere has irregular turbulence due to the UV absorption rate. The Zeppelin design is for cutting though the air to get some where, not to stay in the same place.

But there are countless uses for this airship, especially for the Military.

Neon

- May 4, 2009 @ 12:05 pm PDT

If we make these extremely big, we can use them to fight hurricanes by steering them over the top of spawning areas or over storms themselves to deprive hurricanes of solar energy. We can cool cities in summertime with them, too. Reflecting heat away from being captured in the earth's atmosphere would diminish global warming and could even reverse it. Very large airships (casting an umbra to the surface) could even transport water into deserts from the ocean by setting up slow circular wind patterns as seen in total eclipses of the sun. Melting of mountain glaciers and the Antarctica ice shelf might be coaxed to retain their waters and save New York City from inundation and save the polar bears.

Simply towing even larger (and certainly cheaper) air barges where they were needed to block solar irradiation would be nice. A clear top with photovoltaic panels mounted inside the envelope or at parabolic focus for high efficiency electricity generation should power steering motors reasonably well and take advantage of thermal lift. Extremely large surfaces might harvest electricity from the atmosphere, too, for space elevators through inflated evacuated shafts, or for powering the planet with inexpensive energy.

Actually, I have discovered a room temperature super-conductor that might be just the ticket for these puppies.

TogetherinParis

- May 12, 2009 @ 09:05 pm PDT