Posted on 03/04/2012 11:28:49 PM PST by U-238
The Pentagon has mothballed a laser-equipped jumbo jet after 15 years and $5 billion worth of research to develop an airborne missile defense system.
Budget cuts shot down the Airborne Laser Test Bed but some research into anti-missile lasers will continue, according to the U.S. Missile Defense Agency.
"We didn't have the funding to continue flying the aircraft," agency spokeswoman Debra Christman told the Los Angeles Times (http://lat.ms/xEnw3z ).
The plane, a Boeing 747 mounted with a high-energy chemical laser, has been sent into storage at Davis Monthan Air Force Base, the agency said. The base near Tucson, Ariz., serves as a boneyard for military aircraft.
The Boeing had been based at Edwards Air Force Base in Southern California's Mojave Desert. It was the centerpiece of the laser-based missile defense system research program that began in 1996.
It provided hundreds of Southern California jobs through aerospace companies such as Boeing Co. and Northrop Grumman Corp.
The conclusion of the program "represents the end of a historic era in airborne directed energy research, not only for Edwards Air Force Base but for the Department of Defense at large," Lt. Col. Jeff Warmka, director of the Airborne Laser Test Bed Combined Test Force at Edwards, told the Times.
It was one in a series of missile defense programs that originated in President Ronald Reagan's Strategic Defense Initiative in 1983 — the so-called "Star Wars" missile shoot-down effort that was criticized as impractical, expensive and overreaching.
The Missile Defense Agency said the program completed a key objective in February 2010 when the laser-equipped plane tracked and destroyed a test missile in flight off the Southern California coast.
(Excerpt) Read more at cbsnews.com ...
It wasn’t—it was just a big science project. This was actually a good decision that should have been made long ago. Allows the Missile Defense Agency to focus its resources on more viable programs like Aegis BMD and Ground-based Missile Defense.
Perhaps the recent success of the Arrow Weapons System is one of the reasons for dropping the laser system (see: http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/2854575/posts)
A President who took his Constitutional obligation to defend the country seriously would continue to persue both systems. However, this President has taken money from Defense so that Sadra Fluke can have orgies. So the Defense department is going with the system that is closer to implementation
Not one single elected official in the republican party has complained. Bush was attacked and forced to show the dims ever receipt where every penny was paid for by the campaign. That is just one reason of many that I am no longer a “republican”. I may vote for Conservative republicans... but the party left me.
LLS
I am still a Republican, but one who does not believe in his party.
REpublican politicans seem to enjoy having the Democrats pee down their leg and tell them it’s raining.
They stand there with it running down their leg and grinning.
That was my thought on it. Because it’s a plane, it’s ability to carry the chemical fuel would be limited and you couldn’t refuel readily. So, unless the system was super efficient, the application for using a plane was relatively limited.
But I do see the potential use of lasers in a ground-based defense system.
LLS
You obviously did not look at the cutaway, the laser fills the 747, it wouldn't even fit on a 707 airframe, let alone leave any rooms for the stuff already on the AWACS. I've been in one, they are pretty crowded.
They may have, although I don't think so. But in any event it would not help. Might make the damage worse. That's not your laser pointer. The beam carries lots of momentum, It kills not so much by absorption of the energy in the beam, but rather by momentum transfer, just like a really hot bullet.
The higher density, and humidity, air at low altitude cause problems. Blooming and absorption, chief among them.
It’s interesting to know lasers can do that at relatively short ranges - I know there are concepts such as Solar Sails which use the principle of momentum transfer of photons to achieve high velocities, but that takes huge distances and times to achieve the acceleration.
Any literature on momentum transfer through lasers would be greatly appreciated.
This is a prototype. Once they get it working better, they will figure out how to make it more compact.
And rather than make it fit in a 707 airframe, I was thinking more of having an AWACS radar attached to a more modern plane ( the cancelled E-10 was supposed to be based on a 767, but they might see about using a 747 as the base for a merged AWACS/laser system)
I once worked on a proposal for a new AWACs, it would have had a 3 sided AESA (Active Electronically Steerable Array) radar, a lot more power and gain, and thus detection range,than the current AWACs (needed for stealthy targets), and based on a 747 airframe. It still would have taken up most of the aircraft.
Besides the mission profiles are unlikely to be compatible.
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