LASER JET PAYOFF

A few days ago, we found out that the Airborne Laser — that’s the mod­i­fied 747, designed to zap incom­ing mis­siles — suc­cess­fully tested its ray gun for the first time. Well, it seems that good for­tune comes with a price. Because the Missile Defense Agency has just added $1.47 bil­lion to the pro­gram,” the jet’s pro­gram man­ager tells Inside Missile Defense.
That means the price of the project just dou­bled, instantly. And there could be more to come. The Missile Defense Agency (MDA) offi­cials are only about “80 per­cent” sure that this new wind­fall will cover the cost of the Airborne Laser (ABL) tests they want to run.
Originally, the ABL was sup­posed to be blast­ing by 2002. Now, the MDA isn’t com­mit­ting to a timetable. But they do have three goals in mind: keep test­ing the 747’s laser, fin­ish the plane’s “bat­tle man­age­ment sys­tem,” and shore up the ABL’s “beam con­trol sys­tem, which is really crit­i­cal to our abil­ity to be able to point and track the high-​​energy laser.”

While the laser is being tested on the ground, the air­craft will begin a series of flight tests — fewer than 20 in total — car­ry­ing the beam con­trol and the bat­tle man­age­ment sys­tem. Initially, with the beam con­trol sys­tem we will just test what we call the pas­sive pieces, which is with­out the two solid state lasers we use to track the mis­sile, ABL Program Manager Air Force Col. Ellen Pawlikowski said. We will check that out, we will do some tests to make sure we get good hand­off between bat­tle man­age­ment and beam con­trol. Then we will bring the plane back down for a short period and we will put two illu­mi­nat­ing lasers on [the air­craft] in the sec­ond half of 2005.
When the laser fin­ishes all of its ground tests, pro­gram offi­cials will move it out of the sys­tems inte­gra­tion lab and begin putting it on the ABL air­craft, Pawlikowski said. We will do that as the next step after we fin­ish the flight tests and the ground tests and then we will have our final test period when we test the com­plete sys­tem first against tar­get boards and then against a boost­ing mis­sile.
Program offi­cials will take a mea­sured approach as they fin­ish each major phase, such as the com­ple­tion of the first light test, accord­ing to Pawlikowski. We will do two things when we reach a major mile­stone, she said. We will look at what our sched­ule is and what does the bud­get look like for the rest of that path. I am not going to tell you today that we are going to com­plete such-​​and-​​such by 2006 because I am going to look at that in January, when we fin­ish these two mile­stones, and then I am going to look at it again. And we are going to take it one step at a time.”

November 17th, 2004 | Lasers and Ray Guns | Comments Off Both comments and pings are currently closed.