Within a year, a pair of souped-up $2.7 billion blimps (price includes R&D) will be floated 10,000 feet above the District of Columbia and act as a 340-mile-wide eye in the sky, detecting incoming missiles and the like.
The design and testing phase for JLENS—the Joint Land Attack Cruise Missile Defense Elevated Netted Sensor System, produced by Raytheon, a major weapons manufactuer—is over, relays Program Director Doug Burgess to Popular Mechanics. Now, it is time for implementation. Or, as he puts it, "[We're] getting away from the Ph.D. engineer types running the system to the 20- or 25-year-old soldier running the system."
The idea to employ blimps to protect a city is actually not new. During World War II, London deployed a similar system to protect against Nazi air strikes. The barrage balloons, as they were called, acted as fence posts for a spool of wire that would make it difficult for planes to maneuver in the city. Basically, they were barbed wire fences suspended a few thousand feet in the air. They were also filled with hydrogen, which upon impact with a plane would explode. This is what they looked like:
