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B… lasing!

One of the thing that we do on the Central California Coast, just for “kicks,” is to shoot down ballistic missiles with airborne lasers! :-)

On February 11, the dramatically downsized Pentagon’s Airborne Laser prototype weapons system destroyed a ballistic missile in flight off the Central California Coast. In a statement released yesterday, Greg Hyslop, VP and GM of Boeing Missile Defense Systems said “The Airborne Laser Testbed team has made history with this experiment.”

The U.S. Missile Defense Agency described the potential for the use of directed energy to attack multiple targets at the speed of light at a range of hundreds of kilometers, with a low “cost per intercept” compared to current technologies. The Pentagon had once planned to build as many as seven of the Airborne Laser aircraft (a modified Boeing 747-400F. Last spring, Defense Secretary Robert Gates canceled plans to build a second plane.

On the evening of February 11, an “at-seas mobile launch platform” (there was no indication whether this was a surface ship or a submarine) fired a short-range “threat representative” liquid-fueled ballistic missile. Within seconds, the modified 747 detected the missile as it lifted off and used a low-energy laser (the Track Illuminator) to track it, then used a second low-energy laser (the Beacon Illuminator) to assess and adjust for atmospheric disturbance. Finally, the aircraft engaged the megawatt-class High Energy Laser, which Boeing calls “the most powerful mobile laser device in the world, which fires through a telescope in the nose of the aircraft. Within two minutes of the launch, the laser had heated a pressurized segment of the missile to “critical structural failure.”

Later, a second, solid-fueled short-range missile was launched from San Nicolas Island, CA, and the aircraft engaged it, but stopped firing the High Energy Laser before destroying the missile, which was similar to a missile that the system had destroyed a week earlier.

CNET has a series of infrared images of the target missile breaking up in flight on February 11.

-Bill at

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©2010 William F. Hackett. All Rights Reserved.

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