{"id":431,"date":"2016-01-22T17:13:18","date_gmt":"2016-01-22T22:13:18","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.carloswsmith.com\/blog\/?p=431"},"modified":"2016-01-23T15:25:35","modified_gmt":"2016-01-23T20:25:35","slug":"return-of-the-abl-missile-defense-agency-works-on-laser-drone-breaking-defense-defense-industry-news-analysis-and-commentary","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.carloswsmith.com\/blog\/?p=431","title":{"rendered":"Return Of The ABL? Missile Defense Agency Works On Laser Drone \u00ab Breaking Defense – Defense industry news, analysis and commentary"},"content":{"rendered":"

HUNTSVILLE, ALA.: Three years after the Missile Defense Agency mothballed its massive Airborne 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. \u201cThe problem with boost phase is\u2026you\u2019ve got to get close enough,\u201d Frank Kendall, the Pentagon\u2019s procurement chief, told reporters at the Space & Missile Defense conference here. By closing in, he said, \u201cyou get a softer target: The booster, the rocket itself, is a lot softer than the reentry vehicles.\u201d But if you\u2019re close enough to shoot at a rocket right after it launches from enemy territory, you\u2019re probably close enough for the enemy to shoot you. \u201cI was in the Pentagon when the Airborne Laser was proposed, and I asked questions about how many we would have to buy, how we\u2019d know to put them in the air, and how we\u2019d keep them alive,\u201d Kendall recalled. \u201cWe didn\u2019t have good answers to those questions, but we went ahead with the Airborne Laser anyway.\u201d The Missile Defense Agency will take an \u201cincremental, step-wise, knowledge-based\u201d approach this time, pledged the MDA director, Vice Adm. James Syring, in remarks to the Huntsville conference. \u201cIt is a very different approach than we did in the past of just leaping to something and investing everything we had.\u201d MDA will conduct experiments and review alternatives until 2018-2019, when Syring said it will pick \u201cwhich technologies we think have the most promise.\u201d Then a \u201clow-power laser demonstrator\u201d will fly circa 2021. When the full-power system will enter service is an open question, not answered in Syring\u2019s brief. MDA has already used existing drones to experiment with the systems required to aim the laser. \u201cThe work that we\u2019re 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,\u201d 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 \u201cgreat work\u201d 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 \u201ctens of kilometers\u201d away, Syring said, using about a megawatt of power. For the illustrative concept of operations the MDA director briefed at the conference \u2014 which he emphasized was not the only option \u2014 \u201cwe need to be hundreds of kilometers [from the target] in a platform that can go much higher and stay up for much longer.\u201d 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. \u201c65,000 feet is where we think we need to be,\u201d said Syring, where the air is so thin that a laser beam can reach much farther. Even in ideal atmospheric conditions, however, the power requirements are high: \u201chundreds of kilowatts to megawatt-class,\u201d Syring said. \u201cWe\u2019re today at tens of kilowatts in the lab with the beam quality we\u2019re after.\u201d What matters is not just maximum power, but how much weight it takes to generate (power density), especially when you\u2019re trying to fit the laser on an aircraft. The Airborne Laser took 55 kilograms (about 120 pounds) to generate a kilowatt of laser power, Syring said, which is why a megawatt (1,000 kW) took a 747. Electric lasers currently in the lab take 35-40 kilograms per kilowatt, and the MDA research program plans to drive that down by a factor of ten, to 3-5 kg\/kW. MDA\u2019s ultimate goal is 2 kg\/kW, which would make a one-megawatt weight 5,000 pounds, something a drone could carry. \u201cIf it had been easy we would done it by now,\u201d Syring said. But given the rapid progress in laser technology, he went on, \u201cit\u2019s not a huge reach.\u201d \u201cThere\u2019s a lot of work that has go on,\u201d the admiral continued. In the traditional \u201ccrawl, walk, run\u201d scheme, \u201cwe\u2019re in crawl mode at this point,\u201d he said, \u201cbut that doesn\u2019t mean we should stop.\u201d \u201cIs such a system in the realm of the possible?\u00a0\u00a0Yes,\u201d said Mark Gunzinger, a laser expert and advocate at the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments. \u201cTechnology would support the development and possibly fielding of a 300 kilowatt or more solid-state laser within five years,\u201d he told me. \u201cDeveloping and integrating an SSL with a very high-altitude unmanned aircraft which would probably have to be designed from scratch would take longer, of course.\u201d \u201cI think the most important point<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Source: Return Of The ABL? Missile Defense Agency Works On Laser Drone \u00ab Breaking Defense – Defense industry news, analysis and commentary<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

HUNTSVILLE, ALA.: Three years after the Missile Defense Agency mothballed its massive Airborne 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 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6,23],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-431","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-robotics","category-warfare"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.carloswsmith.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/431","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.carloswsmith.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.carloswsmith.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.carloswsmith.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.carloswsmith.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=431"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.carloswsmith.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/431\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":432,"href":"https:\/\/www.carloswsmith.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/431\/revisions\/432"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.carloswsmith.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=431"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.carloswsmith.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=431"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.carloswsmith.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=431"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}