A way to fly a balloon in and out of the stratosphere

Wow! Whatta deal. A flaccid, double walled baggie that will take on the jet stream climbing its way up to the stratosphere. While carrying useful payload (along with a few pumps to move air around). For months at a time. And come back to earth at the same weight.

Yessiree. Step right up ladies & gents. Be the first to throw money at the purveyors of this magical machine.

Just don't try to deliver it personally. Their Florida address is probably under a few feet of water.

The Economist just confirmed P.T. Barnum's dictum: "There's one born every minute." April 1 was last month in case you missed it.

Everything will be fine until one day the ship crashes in an open field not far from Roswell, New Mexico.

Ethane? The Germans solved the airship fuel problem 80 years ago. It's called blaugas.

The penny stock scam continues with the author failing to do any DD on the Company which has been a fraud since the days it was called ADGI. One company insider testified that the initial demo of the airship was a fraud. The ex-CEO and ex-CFO have pled guilty to fraud. There is a civil action pending against the company from the SEC for fraud. The new officers of the company left another company which just had its shares revoked; GlobalNet. While at GlobalNet, they used GTC to promote wireless services in Iraq, Libya, and Cuba. While no contract work was ever completed towards those services, family members of GTC received $millions$ in shares for the work that was never completed. Sanswire also owes over $200K in employee payroll taxes dating back to 2007 and the Federal Lien associated with those taxes disqualifies Sanswire for any government work. Sanswire has also not made any payments for their rights to the STS-111 since 2008. For a quick history of the new players in the company, one should check out a website promoting a book called "America at Night." GTC is associated with some legendary con artists and Sanswire is rife with new con artists making a name for themselves.

I wonder how much the author and "The Economist" got paid to promote this fraud?

Sign, it would be really nice if the US would start focusing on things other than empire maintenance.

It's a little irritating that we were continually told that we couldn't afford healthcare but that we need more super-gigantic-stealth-spy-blimps.

Now that is a clever idea! -
May the Zeppelins have a true come back!
Per old adage: simplefy, simplefy, simplfy!

All dirigible airships had "ballonets" which were air filled bags inside the envelope to cope with changes in altitude without losing hydrogen or helium. It's not quite clear what the difference is here other than that the air bags are outside the gas bags rather than the traditional arrangement which was the reverse.

Could all the gas be vented and the blimp fold into a parachute for the payload?

Presumably, The Economist got tired of the steam-driven robot idea real quick, and decided to replace that joke with another cuckoo plan from the US military. Again, as if anyone with a high school education needs to be told, dirigibles are totally impractical, and can never be made feasible and cost-efficient. As always, the bugaboo is lift, since every additional measure of weight requires a vast addition of volume to hold gas. By the time the designers include enough equipment to allow the dirigible to pay for itself, the balloon needs to be too large to manufacture.

Perhaps materials science and so on has advanced to the extent that the US military can afford the constant money drain required to put up a dirigible in the stratosphere. I'll believe it when I see it.

Hi folks,
Interesting article, but there are no companies anywhere near to being able to deploy a high altitude airship (HAA) of any type. Most just have flying models or balloons on a string designed more to attract investors than to do anything useful. If you want to develop a new airship the best way forward is to start with a modern blimp like the Skyship 600 or Sentinel 1000, that has already been proven useful and then improve the design or build a bigger version, rather than some new attempt to reinvent the wheel. If you want to see more on airships see www.airshipblimp.com or my helium sniffing comedy site www.airship.me
Regards Bond, James Bond (Skyship driver in A View to a kill)

Sounds like a good idea, whether it is derivative of earlier technology or not. I am sure that many beyond just the military will be interested in this - presumably a fleet of just two of these could maintain a sufficiently accurate station to deliver satellite TV, or wireless internet?

BigBrother states are going to be delighted when this technology is in perfect running...

I wonder if these balloons are able to fly over California!
http://openpr.com/news/19379/LA-COUNTY-SHERIFFS-TO-LEVY-AND-SEIZE-GLOBET...

The author should have at least read the Economist article from 2004 on the same subject. According to that article, the Strat was supposed to be launched over five years ago. Now, according to the new article, testing won't begin until next year. How's that for progress?

Its a shame to see the Economist turn into a penny stock newsletter, but I guess times are tough in the print media these days.

http://www.economist.com/search/displaystory.cfm?story_id=E1_PQNPDNG

Can't imagine a blimp that size being overly stealthy. And I doubt it is very expensive either - it's just a long balloon. Surely enormously cheaper than putting satellites into space.

As for the amount of lift - a satellite is a pretty small/light thing. And it has a life of many years and quite high reliability requirements, where whatever payload goes on the blimp presumably only needs to last a few weeks or months, and if it breaks you bring the blimp back down, and send up a replacement. I would have thought this would be enormously cheaper than the current alternatives.

I'm more concerned with the Sanswire management team's ability to follow through on the commercialisation of ANY dirigible and not go belly up. These could be very economical, and given the scarcity of satellite space, very logical for fulfillment of all manner of communication, warfare and emergency needs, but I believe the Economist fell uncharacteristically short this time around in its due diligence of this company and particularly the person quoted in the article. Difficult to find the quoted credible as he sells off shares of his own company.

Sanswire has been working on this technology for a number of years. Through their colaboration with other tech companies, I believe they will accomplish their goals.

I'm buying more of their stock.