Breaking Defense:
HUNTSVILLE, ALA.: Three years after the Missile Defense Agency mothballed its massiveAirborne Laser, MDA is planning to reboot the concept for a new era.
The old ABL was Boeing 747 with a human crew and tanks of toxic chemicals to generate power. The new idea a high-altitude, long-endurance drone armed with a more compact electrically powered laser. But the technical and tactical challenge remains the same: building a laser-armed aircraft that can shoot down ballistic missiles at their most vulnerable, just after launch, without having to fly so close it gets shot down itself.
“The problem with boost phase is…you’ve got to get close enough,” Frank Kendall, the Pentagon’s procurement chief, told reporters at the Space & Missile Defense conference here. By closing in, he said, “you get a softer target: The booster, the rocket itself, is a lot softer than the reentry vehicles.” But if you’re close enough to shoot at a rocket right after it launches from enemy territory, you’re probably close enough for the enemy to shoot you.
“I was in the Pentagon when the Airborne Laser was proposed, and I asked questions about how many we would have to buy, how we’d know to put them in the air, and how we’d keep them alive,” Kendall recalled. “We didn’t have good answers to those questions, but we went ahead with the Airborne Laser anyway.”
The Missile Defense Agency will take an “incremental, step-wise, knowledge-based” approach this time, pledged the MDA director, Vice Adm. James Syring, in remarks to the Huntsville conference. “It is a very different approach than we did in the past of just leaping to something and investing everything we had.”
MDA will conduct experiments and review alternatives until 2018-2019, when Syring said it will pick “which technologies we think have the most promise.” Then a “low-power laser demonstrator” will fly circa 2021. When the full-power system will enter service is an open question, not answered in Syring’s brief.
MDA has already used existing drones to experiment with the systems required to aim the laser. “The work that we’re doing with the General Atomics Reaper and the work that we did with the Boeing Phantom Eye starts to show it can be done, in terms of these long-range sensing and tracking capabilities that we need,” Syring said.
The Missile Defense Agency is setting itself a higher bar than other military laser efforts. The Army, Air Force, and Navy have done “great work” on laser weapons for other missions, Syring said, but shooting down missiles in the boost phase requires much greater power, range, and beam quality. In fact, it may require higher performance than even the massive Airborne Laser managed.
In a successful 2010 test, ABL shot down a ballistic missile “tens of kilometers” away, Syring said, using about a megawatt of power. For the illustrative concept of operations the MDA director briefed at the conference — which he emphasized was not the only option — “we need to be hundreds of kilometers [from the target] in a platform that can go much higher and stay up for much longer.”
The manned Airborne Laser maxed out at an altitude of about 40,000 feet, where clouds and turbulence made it harder to keep the beam on the target. “65,000 feet is where we think we need to be,” said Syring, where the air is so thin that a laser beam can reach much farther…
