LASER RELAYS FLASHING BACK?

Walking through my old neigh­bor­hood yes­ter­day, I noticed a girl, maybe 17, wear­ing a lit­tle painter’s cap, the brim flipped up and cocked slightly to one side. It was a look I hadn’t seen since I was 17, myself. And I never dreamed that it would come back to Manhattan, even as aren’t-we-ironic kitsch.
I men­tion this because, just like in fash­ion, defense tech­nolo­gies have a way of cycling back into style no mat­ter how silly they might seem the first time around. Boeing is hop­ing that it’s found one of those retro-​​chic sys­tems, Aviation Week reports: an “elab­o­rate relay mir­ror pro­to­type to extend the range of laser weapons.“
It’s an idea that first gained cur­rency in the 80’s, dur­ing Ronald Reagan’s “Star Wars” anti-​​missile frenzy, and then died down, after con­trol­ling the beams proved too dif­fi­cult.
There have been exper­i­ments, off-​​and-​​on, ever since. But Boeing would like to lead a full-​​scale revival the laser-​​directing mir­rors, maybe as part of its Airborne Laser (ABL) project the mod­i­fied 747 that’s being designed for the Air Force to zap mis­siles in mid-​​air. Right, now the ABL has a planned range of about 200 km. By bounc­ing the ABL’s beams off of high-​​flying blimps or satel­lites, those rays could reach much, much fur­ther.
“If you can get it out of the atmos­phere, light goes a long way,” the Air Force’s Dr. Billy Mullins told a Washington con­fer­ence ear­lier this year, “you can extend out to hun­dreds and hun­dreds of kilo­me­ters You can strike deep into enemy ter­ri­tory at the speed of light.“
Missiles wouldn’t be the only tar­get. “The relay mir­rors could also be used in con­junc­tion with the Advanced Tactical Laser,” says Aviation Week. That’s the AC-​​130 gun­ship, mod­i­fied to carry a chem­i­cal oxy­gen iodine laser, which spe­cial forces hope to use to take out enemy vehi­cles and the ene­mies them­selves, if need be.
For years, the Air Force Research Laboratory and the Pentagon’s Office of Force Transformation has been push­ing the idea of a “magic,” world-​​wide ring of laser-​​directing mir­rors. The beams could be used to relay com­mu­ni­ca­tions, sup­ply energy to solar-​​electric devices, or, y’know, put smok­ing holes in the less-​​than-​​cooperative.
Getting this long-​​distance roast­ing to work in the real world is going to be extremely tough, Aviation Week notes.

Later this year, Boeing plans to hoist a mir­ror onto a crane at Kirtland AFB, N.M., to sim­u­late the relay capa­bil­ity of an air­borne plat­form…
Among [the] chal­lenges is prov­ing the integrity of the high-​​tech coat­ings on the mir­ror sys­tem; they must with­stand and reflect an enor­mous amount of heat to redi­rect the laser’s energy. Furthermore, Scott Fancher, vice pres­i­dent and gen­eral man­ager of Boeing’s ABL pro­gram, says the integrity of the point­ing and track­ing sys­tems is crit­i­cal to avoid jit­ter that could mis­guide the laser.
Weather and dust [also] pose prob­lems for the sys­tem, as with any laser pro­gram.
“It cer­tainly won’t be an all-​​weather sys­tem,” Fancher says. “Heavy cloud cover will impair its oper­a­tion. But, that’s true of any weapon sys­tem. It will have envi­ron­men­tal lim­i­ta­tions on its range of operations.” 

Funny. I bet they said the same sorts of things the first time around, too.

May 2nd, 2005 | Lasers and Ray Guns | Comments Off Both comments and pings are currently closed.