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A shame that Cessna doesn’t seem to recognize a potential PR gold mine. Remember when Mathias Rust landed a rented Cessna 172 near Red Square in 1987? Not a peep from Cessna headquarters. Now the company appears to have missed out again: In the mega-apocalyptic move 2012, a lowly Cessna 340A saves one extended family from a variety of spectacular demises.

The world’s only Antonov An-225 makes a valiant attempt to do the same but ends up sliding off a cliff and exploding (as does just about everything else, everywhere, 24/7, in this movie). Oh, and Kennedy is back in the White House — the aircraft carrier, that is.

Concept courtesy of Lockheed Martin.

Size matters. (Well, at least in the surveillance world.)

And three projects under way take dimensions to whole new lengths. The LEMV (it stands for Long Endurance Multi-Intelligence Vehicle) is a mammoth hybrid airship championed by the U.S. Army as part of a future fleet of reconnaissance vehicles. As required in the U.S. Army’s LEMV proposal request, the non-rigid autonomous airship must be able to operate at 20,000 feet above sea level, have a 2,000-mile radius, and remain deployed for 21 days.

The 250-foot-long airship will be able to house a 5,000-pound payload of radar and motion-imagery sensors, in addition to other spyware. While the LEMV has yet to be built—Lockheed Martin is one possible airframe supplier—the buoyant behemoth is expected to deploy to Afghanistan within 18 months.

Photograph courtesy AeroVironment, Inc.

On the other end of the spectrum is AeroVironment’s NAV (Nano Air Vehicle) “Mercury,” which weighs less than an ounce. Mercury mimics a bird in flight with its ability to climb and descend vertically—as well as fly sideways and backwards—and is part of a new class of small remote-controlled gadgets able to fly indoors and gather intelligence in urban settings.

Lockheed Martin’s NAV, based on a maple seed, is in the second stage of testing. As we reported in 2006, Lockheed Martin hopes that soldiers will be able to carry the NAV in their pockets, and use the technology to photograph cave interiors, or to see what’s lurking down a blind alley.

Photograph courtesy Lockheed Martin.

According to Jill Krugman, a public affairs officer with Lockheed Martin, DARPA stopped funding the project at the conclusion of phase one. But the company felt development should continue, and the corporation has been funding the project through Independent Research and Design (IRAD). “Through IRAD,” says Krugman, “the team developed the approximately 30″ SAMARAI as a technology demonstrator.” (View a YouTube video of the 30″ prototype here.) As the project progresses, the team will build increasingly smaller versions, based upon what they learn during testing.

Seiran on display at the Steven F. Udvar-Hazy Center (Carolyn Russo/NASM)

Workers at the Hawaii Undersea Research Laboratory announced on November 12 that through the use of submersibles, they had located at 2,600 feet two Japanese submarines that the U.S. military had scuttled off Oahu in 1946 after post-war assessment. One, the I-14, was designed to carry two Aichi M6A Seirans (“storm from the clear sky”) intended to catapult from the sub after it surfaced and attack the U.S. naval fleet. Aichi built 28 Seirans; the sole survivor was restored in 2000 at the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum and put on display in 2003.

The Hawaii Undersea Research Laboratory is financed by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. A documentary on the Laboratory’s find will air on the National Geographic Channel (check local listings).

Photo: ESA/ OSIRIS Team

Europe’s Rosetta spacecraft took these spectacular views of a crescent Earth last week during its final close fly-by. The first frame starts at a distance of 683,000 miles. The last was taken from 198,000 miles.

LightSail 1, the way we hope it will look next year. (Planetary Society)

The history of solar sailing is basically the story of Charlie Brown and the football. It remains a great concept, a technology that could theoretically take us to the stars. But for all their promise, actual solar sail missions tend to end in failure, usually before they even begin, and often through no fault of their own.

Notable disappointments include the Planetary Society’s Cosmos 1, which in 2005 got dumped into the ocean by an errant Volna rocket immediately after launch. Ditto NASA’s Nanosail-D in 2008, except that this time it was a Falcon 1 rocket that failed.

Now, thanks to a $1 million anonymous donation, the Planetary Society is ready to try again with a spacecraft called LightSail, the first of which is due to reach orbit late next year (assuming the Society can raise the rest of the project’s estimated cost of “under $2 million”).

I wish them the best of luck. And I hope when they do fly, they’ll include a nifty experiment that was planned for Cosmos 1, but never got the chance to be tested. Back then physicist Gregory Benford, who’s probably better known as a science fiction writer, along with his brother James, president of Microwave Sciences near San Francisco, proposed hitting Cosmos-1 with a ground-based microwave beam to see if it could impart a modicum of acceleration.

Microwave or laser beam propulsion has been proposed as a way to push sail-equipped starships to fantastic speeds. We’re a long way from building such vehicles, but the Benfords’ experiment was at least a way to get started by testing the basic physics.

Louis Friedman of the Planetary Society, arguably the world’s foremost champion of solar sailing and director of the LightSail program, says it’s too early to say whether a beaming experiment will be included. “I would like to do it, but we have not addressed it yet,” he writes by email.

Let’s hope it works out. And best of luck, too, to the Japanese space agency JAXA, which is planning its own solar sail mission in 2010, called IKAROS.