Airborne Laser Successfully Tracks, Hits Missile 287
fructose writes "The Airborne Laser managed to acquire, track, and illuminate a test missile a few days ago. According to the press release, the Boeing plane 'used its infrared sensors to find a target missile launched from San Nicolas Island, Calif ... issued engagement and target location instructions to the beam control/fire control system ... fired its two solid-state illuminator lasers to track the target and ... fired a surrogate high-energy laser at the target, simulating a missile intercept.' The sensors on board the missile confirmed the 'hit.' Michael Rinn, ABL's program director, said, 'Pointing and focusing a laser beam on a target that is rocketing skyward at thousands of miles per hour is no easy task, but the Airborne Laser is uniquely able to do the job.' The next steps will be to test the high-power laser at full strength in flight and do a complete system test later this year. Its success or failure will determine whether the project gets canceled. Looks like the Real Genius fans out there are finally living the dream."
Re:Just what we need (Score:5, Informative)
Which is generally isn't above the clouds in the stratosphere.
Laser tag (Score:3, Informative)
Billion dollar laser tag. They didn't destroy the missile. The missile's laser tag vest scored the hit.
Re:Just what we need (Score:3, Informative)
Refraction, reflection, dispersion and absorption. Those are the problems.
How many Joules does it take to burn through silica dust? How reflective is LOX? What if the inbound craft is covered with retro-reflecting beads (like stop signs)?
Hopefully they didn't fake it again (Score:5, Informative)
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/star-wars-fake-fooled-the-world-1461979.html [independent.co.uk]
I see a press release from the people who claim to have pulled it off... which doesn't mean a thing.
Re:Just what we need (Score:5, Informative)
Nothing, in theory. Just like there's nothing in theory that says the rocket can't have a zillion other systems designed to defeat this laser. In practice, however, the answer is weight. A rocket's weight is around 80-90% fuel with payload being from 2-5%. A small increase in payload weight leads to a great increase in the rocket's size and fuel load.
A rocket designer ends up having to make a series of compromises between the strength of the rocket itself, the payload and the range. If you want to protect your rocket you're going to have to give up payload, give up range or increase rocket size, all of which make them less useful as weapons.
Re:The question is... (Score:3, Informative)
Actually, the lasers are on a plane, presumably above the clouds. See article.
Re:Just what we need (Score:3, Informative)
My brother-in-law analyzed satellite throw weights for Sandia Labs. A reflective or camo paint job is a trivial addition to the mass of the rocket. OTOH, a perfectly polished surface might well serve the same end at no addition to the mass.
Re:Countermeasures (Score:2, Informative)
When the terrorists blow up Los Angeles, they aren't going to be using an ICBM. They're going to be floating a bomb into the harbor on a container ship. Your fancy airborn lasers will be useless.
But don't let that stop you from wasting billions of dollars on this. It's just all the sooner China takes over as the world's primary superpower.
Re:Just what we need (Score:2, Informative)
That may be true, but you've got to see the limitations in that too. There are no paints that are reflective over a large amount of the light spectrum, so you gotta pick your poison. A normal mirror, for example, would not hold up against an infrared laser.
Furthermore doing that requires knowing the exact frequency of the airborne laser, something which is presumably not public knowledge. It is these days relatively trivial to change the frequency of the laser, e.g. doubling or halving it. Presumably such tricks could be built in and change the frequency "on the fly".
So yes, given enough information you could probably protect the rocket from a single specific laser, for a few years until the next generation of lasers. But it'd require spies to get the information to start with, it would be dependant on not having spies in your own organisation and you'd need a few doctors in chemistry to actually make the paint (since that paint needs to do more than just reflect laser pulses, it must hold up in mutli-mach flight and not heat up, it must not peel off with a constant explosion just below it, it must stand up to both the freezing temperatures in clouds and the heat the rocket will develop during descent. It must even be able to deal with ice formation on the rocket itself, so it's not like you can buy this in your local toy store).
Re:Just what we need (Score:3, Informative)
Even if you are right, if it's simple to increase the reflectivity of the rocket by an order of magnitude, then you make the ABL's job an order of magnitude harder. This would be huge of course, increasing the requirements of the ABL to compensate for atmospheric distortion, increasing the time the ABL has to stay trained on a specific spot, probably affecting effective range, and ultimately reducing the overall cost effectiveness of the ABL. All this for a simple polishing of the rocket.
Re:Was REAL GENIUS wrong? (Score:2, Informative)
There is an even easier work around (Score:3, Informative)
Can you imagine the energy requirement and the number of laser necessary to deflect a full scale attack of say, the russian ? Even if only 50% of the missile go through (and from seeing the dfficulty of development I am being generous) , your country is about as parking-lotted as it can be.
Re:Just what we need (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Shoot it down (Score:1, Informative)
I'm not sure where to begin.
Your post is a summary of every wrongheaded idea that's been posted in the thread so far.
Protective coatings add weight.
Which means either more propellant or a smaller payload.
And since this is rocket science, it isn't as simple as "add another booster stage".
You literally cannot (with current technology) make a missile strong enough
to survive the rotational forces needed to shrug off a high powered laser.
As for being infrared, they're using a really freakin' powerful laser.
Once you're above the clouds, it doesn't matter all that much how dense the atmosphere is.
Re:How does it aim? (Score:5, Informative)
All of the "obvious" solutions like you mention generally will not work. The power levels for the lasers are specifically designed to defeat the known technical counter-measures available to a missile designer. This is why laser weapons have a power rating orders of magnitude greater than is strictly required in most conventional circumstances; they are obviating counter-measures before anyone tries to develop them. Among other things, they are designed to ablate the target faster than you can reflect it or physically spin it.
This is also the reason a lot of US military research focuses on hyper-kinetic weapons these days; good ones can defeat all plausible molecular armor and even weak ones can defeat all current armor. The power levels of US weapon systems are getting to the point where any passive counter-measure would have to be very exotic.
This is based on a media-created myth. The US has never had GPS-guided weaponry, precisely because GPS can be jammed. Therefore, it would not have done much good to have a GPS jammer beyond attracting the attention of missiles designed to destroy RF emitters.
The primary guidance mechanism usually mislabeled as "GPS guided" is ultra-precise inertial guidance, which can't be jammed at all short of altering the physics of the universe. These inertial guidance systems can optionally accept micro-corrections from a GPS input, but only within the (classified) error bounds of the inertial system which are already known to be very small. If the GPS signal deviates from the inertial guidance, the GPS is assumed to be compromised and ignored.
The "GPS-guided weapon" thing is one of many myths about US weapon systems perpetuated by the media. The US never has and never will produce a GPS-guided weapon.
Re:the problem with that trick is (Score:2, Informative)
Our anti-rocket defenses have been gross failures. This technology has a long way to go to be viable.
I'm glad that we have established that you just spout rhetoric made by idiots long before you. That line was first used by Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara (may he burn in hell). Mind you, that was the same man who was responsible for the Edsel at Ford and practically every idiotic military idea during his tenure at the Pentagon.
The Nike Zeus system was consistently [nuclearabms.info] shown to be able to achieve missile kills in the 1960s using its standard nuclear warhead. I've also heard that there was a (classified) number of tests where the Zeus rockets made skin kills without said warhead. A modified variant was also capable of ASAT kills. The Zeus system, combined with a bomber such as the B-70 Valkyrie, would have rendered ICBMs obsolete. It was only the fact that we had a SecDef with a hard-on for ICBMs that ensured their survival.
And, by the way -- Zeus + B-70 would have saved the US a ton of money, relatively speaking, compared to all the money we spend on missiles. We were forced to build hundreds of massive, hardened missile silos to protect our ineffective ICBMs from counterattack. This is an incredible waste of money compared to the cost it would have taken to upgrade our Air Force bases to be able to support an active fleet of B-70s. Not to mention we already had Nike missile sites in place around most major cities; these could have been simply upgraded to Zeus missiles, as had been done with the upgrade from Ajax to Hercules.
Meanwhile, we spend vast sums on this technology when we really ought to be looking to get outside of Earth orbit. 40 years is 30 years too long. We ought to have manned Moon and Mars bases by now.
I believe the wording you're looking for is "Meanwhile, we have spent vast sums on ground wars and Space Shuttle technology when we really ought to be...". The amount of money spent on ABM technology is a drop in the bucket compared both of the above mentioned boondoggles.