At the AUVSI show, Lockheed Martin's Skunk Works revealed new versions of some familiar programs and showed that some projects are livelier than we thought.
Everyone can stop using the photo that we took at DARPATech last year, showing Lockheed Martin's concept for the Blackswift hypersonic research vehicle. (See our earlier reporting here and here.) The real design looks a little different, rather than resembling a scaled-down Falcon HCV.
It's still an F-16-sized vehicle with turbine-based combined-cycle engines, though.
The company is still promoting the technology that it proposed for the DARPA Walrus program, looking at a semi-buoyant aircraft/airship hybrid. The P-791 prototype is in storage at Palmdale, and gets shown to VIP visitors, and the company's talking about a 50-ton payload transport (one-tenth the size of Walrus) and an unmanned surveillance craft with a 4,000-pound payload.
The air-cushion landing gear and heavier-then-air configuration make the vehicle far easier to handle on the ground than a conventional airship. Sadly, though, there's no sign of the money for such a project.
pix: Lockheed Martin
