Blimps had their heyday between World War I and World War II, and since then, they've more or less been left behind by the airplane. Some things, though, blimps are just plain better at, and the Army is getting ready for the first flight of their "Long Endurance Multi-Intelligence Vehicle," aka "spy blimp."

Astronomers use two basic methods to find planets around other stars: watching to see if a star dims when a planet passes in front of it, and watching to see if a star wobbles when a planet orbits around it. Neither of these methods are very good at seeing planets directly, but a giant zeppelin-mounted aerial starshade might be able to change that.

It probably won't surprise you that Google has a fleet of eight private jets. And as anyone with a fleet of eight private jets knows, finding a good place to stash them is never easy. Google has its eye on borrowing an old hangar at NASA's Ames Research Center, and not just any old hangar. It's the big one.

The Air Force uses a variety of different platforms to conduct surveillance over Afghanistan. Putting lots of data sources together to make sense of what's really going on is tricky, so they're spending $211 million on a crash program to launch a 'freakishly large' blimp to coordinate it all.