Word: balloon
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After more than 60 years on the dustheap of aviation history, the Zeppelin is making a comeback--sort of. The fiery death of the Hindenburg put an end to the hydrogen-filled balloon for passenger travel, and even when the lifting gas was replaced by helium, passengers never again trusted the big airships. The last Zeppelin made, the LZ 130, rolled out of the hangar in Friedrichshafen, near the Swiss-German border, in 1938, and it was eventually turned into scrap. At 246-ft. long, the ship that Danneker will pilot, the new Zeppelin NT--for new technology--will disappoint...
...year trip to the Florida Supreme Court envisioned by most experts, or the 75-year flood of individual trials that Webb was crowing about - ought to do the rest. The tobacco lawyers' shrill and relentless hubris might just have resulted in an award that's more like a balloon than a bill, overinflated and ready to burst...
...crafty foe wouldn't limit itself to the Pentagon's single, simple decoy. The enemy could slip its warhead inside a decoy balloon and deploy it along with a dozen identical balloons, forcing the Pentagon into a futile effort to destroy all of them. The warhead might be cloaked in a shroud of liquid nitrogen, chilling it so that the interceptor's heat-seeking sensors couldn't find it. Chemical or biological weapons might be deployed in dozens of bomblets far too numerous to destroy...
Each sensor's 65,000 pixels will feed signals into the interceptor's brain, where lightning-fast calculations involving heat, light, mass and motion are cranked into databases searching for the ballistic fingerprints of enemy warheads. As the interceptor rushes toward its possible targets (the warhead, the balloon and the launch container), it will keep them all within view for as long as possible before discarding the ones its computers say have the least likelihood of being the warhead...
...limitations are still severe. (See previous story.) Critics argue that simple countermeasures by enemy states--such as the use of radar-absorbing materials or balloon decoys--may be enough to foil the U.S.'s pricey shield. Rogue states looking to deliver bombs could simply send them in on cargo ships or in suitcases. One of the few skeptics in Congress, Senator Richard Durbin, an Illinois Democrat, has proposed an amendment to next year's defense-authorization bill requiring that the missile shield be given more realistic tests employing the countermeasures that foes would be likely...