The year is 2015. Word gets out: there’s a runaway blimp. It was more or less thought of as a Baltimore Blimp. To be absolutely clear, it was stationed at Aberdeen Proving Ground.
Military blimp goes AWOL for a joy ride, Tom Vanden Brook, USA Today
This was back when Twitter was really a happening thing. I wish I could recreate fully the explosion of humorous and whimsical runaway blimp posts as they occurred. Baltimore Twitter was in its element.
USA Today even covered the Twitter aspect of the story.
Breakaway blimp thrills Twitter , Jessica Durando, USA Today
You’ll see that this article is full of blank spaces where tweets are no longer available. This is indicative of all the folks who have since left Twitter and completely deleted their accounts.
There was much gleeful hilarity at the rogue, unmanned sky adventurer. There was also a darker side. What was this thing? It wasn’t, strictly speaking, a blimp. The JLENS Aerostat was a military surveillance balloon. The public didn’t know much about it.
Probably the biggest thing we learned from all this was that the initiative had been plagued by failures and cost overruns. There were originally plans for thirty six. Only the two original prototypes were made.
And one of them got away.
I’m not sure if I gave it much thought after that. I guess I thought that this much publicized incident spelled the end of an expensive and unreliable program.
Not so. Recently a photo on Bluesky jogged my memory. Notice anything?
The US Army's surveillance balloons never land, never blink, and now they've got half a billion dollars in funding through 2031 to keep watching from above. - - The Defence Blog on Bluesky
U.S. Army bets $447 million on giant surveillance aerostats, Colton Jones, The Defence Blog
TCOM LP, based in Columbia, Maryland, was awarded a $447 million contract by U.S. Army Contracting Command at Aberdeen Proving Ground, Maryland, to handle production, fielding, sustainment and lifecycle support for the Persistent Surveillance Systems-Tethered family of systems, an aerostat-based surveillance program the Army has relied on for more than a decade.
Wowza. You stop paying attention to these things and they reproduce. And now they even have a Columbia connection.
I don’t know quite how I feel about all this. I enjoyed the thought of a freedom-seeking blimp along with everyone else. Now it feels creepier, somehow.
Well, that’s no surprise. The whole world feels creepier now. I don’t feel one hundred per cent confident that something created for the purpose of military aerial surveillance wouldn’t be turned against the civilian population.
Do you?
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