You’ve probably caught the story from other media. Yesterday, shortly after noon local time, an unmanned Army surveillance blimp broke lose from its moorings in Maryland and floated over Pennsylvania for three hours before coming to ground. This is a very big balloon - just over 240 feet in length. It is known as the Joint Land Attack Cruise Missile Defense Elevated Netted Sensor System, also identified by the letters JLENS. It was designed to be part of a missile defense system. The cost of developing the system was over $2.7 billion over 17 years. Even after spending all of that money, the system hasn’t exactly worked out as planned.

The system has been deployed exclusively in Afghanistan and Iraq. It is designed to be tethered to the ground by a cable when deployed. Since its first deployment, however, it has been filled with problems. Defective software has rendered many of the observations of the balloons unusable. They are particularly vulnerable to bad weather and high winds and that has led to a poor reliability record in combat settings.

Yesterday’s misadventure was pretty public. The balloon rose to an altitude of 16,000 feet and drifted over mostly rural areas, but lots of people on the ground got pictures of it, especially as it neared the end of its flight, where it drifted close to the ground, dragging its tether cable over power lines and tearing them apart.

I’m not sure how much the day’s activities cost, but quite a little bit. There is the cost of the blimp in the first place. As far as I know the individual cost per unit has not been released. But if you take the $2.7 billion price tag and divide it by the estimated 16 aircraft in use, they’re pretty expensive. It is possible, however, that it wasn’t destroyed in the journey. According to unclassified sources, JLENS have come loose in Afghanistan and been recovered, repaired and redeployed. So lets assume, for our study that the aircraft was not a loss. It still was fairly expensive. Two F-16 fighter jets were scrambled for the three hour adventure. The average cost of operating F-16s is around $20,000 per hour. That’s $120,000. Then there is the cost of restoring power to the 19,000 homes that were left without power after the tether dragged down power lines.

We’re talking serious money to fuel a couple of twitter accounts to go wild with blimp stories.

Now, I have some sympathy for the developers and deployers of the system. In my earlier days I did some experimenting with various forms of flight. I built a few kites that weren’t exactly successful in the way envisioned and I spend some money buying supplies to build them. Then there was the experiment with rocket propulsion involving paint thinner as a fuel that set the neighbor’s fence on fire and resulted in nearly $30 of damage, which I had to borrow and repay because I had spent all of my available funds on other experiments. So, I can’t claim to be free from having wasted a few dollars in my flying adventures. We won’t go into the full costs of my years of renting airplanes and an airplane partnership in which I was involved. Suffice it to say that those costs were higher than kites, but considerably less than the JLENS balloons.

What concerns me is that we have gotten to the point where we take those kinds of expenses for granted. Here in the United States the Republican Party is traditionally the party of smaller government, lower expenses and a conservative approach. But at the fiery Republican debate in Colorado last night, there wasn’t a candidate who proposed any decrease in military spending. The cost of defense is unquestioned. Unlimited budgets lead to extravagances that might not occur if developers were required to apply some form of cost effectiveness to their planning.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m awed by the dedication of the men and women who serve in our military and I believe that they need to be supported with fair wages, excellent health benefits and high quality equipment. And I am aware that advanced technological developments contribute to the safety of the citizens of our country. But billions of dollars spent on tethered blimps with software that doesn’t work and tethers that break in poor weather and cause thousands of power outages don’t make me feel any more secure. Apparently the US Army agrees with me. After spending all of those dollars developing the system, it has decided not to proceed with production of the system.

You got it. It took nearly $3 billion to decided that the program doesn’t work and isn’t worth the investment of tax dollars. It is enough to make one wish that we could have found a less expensive way to discover that there are better ways to defend against missiles.

So here is my plan. I think we ought to sell millionaire adventure seekers rides on the blimps to recover part of the cost. After all, there have been plenty of people willing to shell out $250,000 each for one of the first Virgin Galactic flights into space. Wealthy adventurers are willing to pay $20,000 for a ride in the back seat of a fighter jet with a few minutes of supersonic flight. Maybe some of the people who shell out tens of thousands of dollars to go bungie jumping in New Zealand or pay for special thermal suits for high altitude sky diving would pay big money to dangle from a blimp on a cable. Maybe they could bungie jump or parachute from the blimp. It would take quite a few different schemes to earn back the $2.7 spent on developing the JLENS.

I sort of like the idea. Something that was designed to make the general population feel safe could be used to make very wealthy people feel like they are taking a risk. After all it seems that there are people who will pay more money to be frightened than they will invest in security.

So far no one in the Army is taking my idea seriously. I guess they’re trying to figure out how to repair their balloon.

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