This is a 125-foot Bullet Class 580 airship. The airship that will be housed at the NASA Ames Research Center in Mountain View, Calif., will be 235 feet long.

If you like big and green, NASA's Ames Research Center will soon have something for you: the world's largest and greenest airship.

The space agency announced today that the Mountain View, Calif., research center's Moffett Field will soon play host to a mammoth 265-foot-long and 65-foot-diameter airship from Kellyton, Ala.'s E-Green Technologies. The Bullet Class 580 will be developed and tested at Ames in 24,000 square feet of Ames' famous Hangar 2.

The new airship, which has a planned first flight date of early 2011, is expected to run on algae-based biofuel, and fly at speeds of up to 75 miles an hour at altitudes of up to 20,000 feet.

Ames and Moffett Field are becoming a hotbed for airships. Already, the facility is the home of Airship Ventures, and its own giant zeppelin. And, of course, Moffett Field has a storied history of hosting airships, stretching back to 1933, when the U.S. Navy's Zeppelin ZRS-5 785-foot-long zeppelin resided there.

The U.S. Navy Zeppelin ZRS-5, also known as the Macon, which was berthed at Moffett Field starting in 1933.

The E-Green Technologies Bullet Class 580 is expected to fly with "a joint NASA Langley Research Center and Old Dominion University payload, the Radar Oxygen Barometric Sensor Project, a remote sensing instrument for measuring barometric pressure at sea level--an important meteorological measurement in the prediction and forecasting of tropical storms and hurricanes."