Lockheed Martins HAA (High Altitude Airship) might not get finished

There has been an article by Reuters, today, that I at first didn't want to talk about but after Thomas A.Frank at the Airship-list was the second source to talk about this I thought it's might be worth mentioning. So to the Article, it was called "U.S. cruise missile defence said possible in 14 months" It talks about Lockheed lobbying for a program to defend against missiles. Part of this system should have been the High Altitude Airship [HAA] as a surveillance platform. The article states:

...
The company had high hopes for its $148 million High Altitude Airship program, for airships priced at just under $40 million apiece that can hover and monitor a 500-square-mile area for about two months.

But the Pentagon's Missile Defence Agency cut the program's budget sharply in fiscal year 2007 and requested no funding at all for 2008. Lockheed convinced lawmakers to reinstate the 2007 funds, and there is an amendment to provide a small sum in 2008, but the program's outlook is grim at this point.

Christopher Bolkcom, defence specialist at the Congressional Research Service, said cruise missiles were difficult to track and that Lockheed's forecast about deploying a wide-area defence was "optimistic."

Bolkcom said U.S. policymakers had likely done "the mental calculus that it's too expensive, too hard, on the one hand, and the threat is not big enough to justify it, on the other."
...

It's clearly understandable why Lockheed is trying to push the project and get Governmental Funding, because there is a lot of money behind it. But as the article says, the threat against the US-Coastline is probably not big enough to fund such an expensive project. As the article states further on:

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The U.S. military has plans to protect troops, ships and overseas bases from cruise missile attacks, but it has no plan and no budget to protect the U.S. coastline, Kueter said.
...

So it seems that Lockheed is facing the same problems many Airship Development projects are facing and this problem is missing funding. The full article can be read at Reuters.com

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• You can read more about Lockheed Martin in our previous posts.