Boeing's airborne laser finally blows something up

Don't tell me ...... Let me guess.

The target was a watermellon?

Ed Weldon

Only if it was R. Lee Ermey doing the shooting.

Ronald Ray-Gun (RIP) would be proud.

I'm glad to hear that our billions spent on the SDI related projects has finally yielded some practical results (that we know of).

I sure was hoping that the Air force would've tested some of their space-based weapons when N. Korea was lighting off ballistic missiles earlier in the year like it was the 4th of July. But, I guess they either didn't want to show their cards or these weapons do not exist. I guess we will just have to keep speculating.

I was telling everyone.... "Let's do it"...

Ah...but can it be used to pop enough popcorn to fill a house?

...let the "STAR WARS" begin!

..."Light Sabres" are next!

an unspecified ground target ...
That will be close enough for the USAF
Del

Interesting point Del. Goes to show how we can get lead astray by the simplest misdirection. How close was the specified target from the destroyed unspecified target? For that matter what do they mean by "destroy"? Did the gazillion dollar laser peel the paint of the unspecified building? Maybe more like after ten minutes of illumination from the laser, the black tar flat roof of a building on the White Sands proving grounds ignited in the clear noon day sun. Firefighters were on hand to prevent the fire from spreading as it took another half hour for the building to collapse. Lets not forget, our military arms merchants have been caught putting a squib charge into a target, just for show but claiming safety.

I'll just bet that they use some nice shiny mirror finish metal to steer the beam instead of moving the whole plane. This way they can pan and tilt the beam direction to engage multiple targets. Good thing they cannot make missiles out of shiny metal material.

What effect would any laser have on a shiny, spinning missile?

It would seem to take a lot more energy to destroy the missile if it was rotating,because the heat would be spread around the perimeter.

More details here

http://www.asd-network.com/press_detail/22860/Boeing_ATL_Defeats_Ground_Target_in_Flight_Test_.htm

Nice to see that they actually finally got it all working together. As a long time follower of this project I think this is the very first time it has been properly fired in the air (previously the targeting laser was used to simulate a kill).

As for the target, disabled but obviously not vapourised (not enough power sorry). Since the press release did not mention that the "target's characterization uncertainties were overwhelmed" only defeated, we can all assume that the stationary vehicle target did not explode. A good (if not very slow to arrive) development step.

Why do I get the cynical feeling that they could do more damage if they just dropped the 12,000lb chemical laser on top of the target.

The Wright Brothers didn't start out with a trans-Atlantic crossing either.

Actually the comparison is pretty good, Brave Sir Robin.

I'd have to leave the forum and go out to Wiki to check the dates, but I do believe it was 1927 before Lindberg made his crossing.

I know that in '84 or '85 Scientific American published articles that basically said SDI, or Star Wars, would not work because I incorporated some of the facts of the time into a fictional espionage short story that still to this time at 350,000 copies is my most printed writing.

We are in both cases talking around 25 years.

I don't see us going with directed energy weapons to any large degree anytime soon. I believe the development of these weapons will be considerably longer than military and commercial avaition to be sure. We keep running into the limitations of physics. The difficulty always lies with how do you store, transport, and then convert that energy into a directed beam of (fill in the blank here) energy to accomplish the desired end-state. Will directed energy systems get implemented? Absolutely. We already use defensive systems to protect aircraft from missile attacks. But for most applications a kinetic energy weapon (with explosive warheads as applicable) propelled by a chemical are still the most efficient weapons for closer range work and rockets for longer range work. I believe the directed energy weapons will be more to disable or disarm rather than outright destruction.

And the video footage of the test target (a truck, specifically its engine bay).

http://www.popsci.com/military-aviation-amp-space/article/2009-10/pew-airborne-military-laser-takes-out-truck

It's a little hard to see if the beam actually made it thru the hood or how much damage was actually done, but then again I have seen military footage of mortar rounds being targeted, hit and exploded in mid air by the US fixed site laser test platform.

Success at last.

Not sure about the DoD's final price tag for this gizmo, but I got even better results when I poured some gas - about a dime's worth - on my brother's truck late last night and lit it with his wife's pink lighter that I found on the seat and left on the hood...

They claim that they penetrated the hood and ruined the engine. Not from what I saw there.

Let me take a small tangent from this enormous financial demonstration. The purpose of this system is supposedly to stop a launched missile that has a WMD warhead. Frankly I think that concept is trying to stop the wrong type of weapons system and not what this platform will do. Intercontinental missiles are not sneaky weapons where nobody knows where they came from. This is the basic principle of MAD. Also nobody has ever successfully won a war because of their use of ICBMs. The most effective use for this system is to surreptitiously knock out a satellite. The U.S. Navy's anti-satellite approach uses an airborne launched missile, a missile that can be tracked by radar. This optical long distance drill leaves no trace to track. Missile defense? I think not.

"...to stop a launched missile that has a WMD warhead."

The original concept behind a laser-based missile defense system was to score the surface of the vehicle's heat shield sufficiently that the vehicle would burn up on reentry. The Manzano Weapons Research facility near Albuquerque, NM built and tested a large, very efficient (over 60%) gas-flow-dynamic CO₂ laser in the early 1970s - long before Reagan's 'Star Wars' defense program. The project was not successful because its developers did not anticipate the extent to which atmospheric CO₂ absorbed the beam's energy en route. As with most (if not all) gases, CO₂'s absorption spectrum is identical to its emission spectrum. Consequently, much of the beam's energy was lost to atmospheric heating; up to 30,000 degrees in some cases (comparable to the temperature of a lightning stroke), creating a hot plasma along the beam path. This radically altered the path's optical properties, including (and perhaps especially) its refractive index. The beam 'wandered' as a result, making targeting virtually impossible.

Why the laser's designers did not anticipate this effect is (to me, at least) nothing less than astonishing. If that were my lab, you can be damn sure some heads would roll.

They claim that they penetrated the hood and ruined the engine. Not from what I saw there.

Correct. I wondered why the video supplied didn't match the test results, the video was of a test firing, not the actual shot that disabled the vehicle.

http://www.defensetech.org/archives/005044.html#comments

Guess they didn't want people to know too much about the weapon's abilities (although they have given enough information for smart people to make educated guesses about weapon effectiveness).

Chalk this misunderstanding up to military secrecy + incomplete reporting of the facts.