Star Wars may be dead, but its progeny live on: while the Pentagon has abandoned its plans to shoot down enemy missiles with lasers fired from space, the US Air Force has revived the idea, but brought it closer to the ground. The Air Force has awarded two contracts for the design of a missile-destroying laser carried aboard a Jumbo jet.
The airborne laser would be powerful enough to destroy enemy missiles from hundreds of kilometres away. During war, the 747 would fly a holding pattern in friendly territory that would keep it in range of the enemy's launch pads, but out of reach of anti-aircraft missiles.
The Rocketdyne Division of Rockwell International and a group of contractors led by Boeing have both been asked to design an airborne laser system. The contracts are together worth $44 million.
Infrared sensors aboard the plane would detect the plume of hot gases from a missile's rocket engine. That information would be used to aim a laser at the missile through an opening in the plane's fuselage. The system would offer a big advantage over ground-based anti-missile missiles such as the Patriot, says Bill Robinson, manager of Rocketdyne's airborne laser programme. If the missile is destroyed while its engines are still burning, debris is likely to fall on enemy territory, he says. The Patriot destroys incoming missiles in the last moments of flight. During the Gulf War, people in Saudi Arabia and Israel were killed and property damaged by such debris.
During the heyday of the Strategic Defense Initiative, the Pentagon planned a constellation of orbiting lasers that would have done much the same job as the airborne laser system. Those plans have evaporated, as has almost all the funding for space-based laser research.
The aircraft system avoids the enormous cost of launching laser satellites that might lie idle for years before being called into use. Also, Robinson says, maintenance is simpler. 'With an aircraft, if you have a problem, you just land it and fix it,' he says. 'With the satellites, you would have to use the space shuttle.'
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