Posted on 06/04/2002 6:50:14 AM PDT by Stand Watch Listen
Of all the new weapon systems planned for the US Air Force (USAF), service leaders say they consider the Airborne Laser (ABL), like the F-22 Raptor air-supremacy fighter, truly transformational because it will revolutionise warfare.Now, after almost a decade of development, the USAF and Missile Defense Agency (MDA) are poised to begin flying the first ABL test aircraft in the next several months and move what they say is one step closer to an operational system.
Loitering at altitudes around 40,000ft, the ABL system is designed to destroy boosting ballistic missiles with a multi-megawatt laser beam that travels at the speed of light over great distances. The high-energy beam, which will be about the diameter of a basketball, will heat the side of a missile until it fails structurally and tumbles to earth. Ideally, ABL programme officials say, the missile, along with its payload, will land on the territory of those who launched it.
The ABL system is carried aboard a modified Boeing 747-400F commercial freighter aircraft. It will house a high-energy chemical oxygen iodine laser (COIL), sophisticated beam-control system with adaptive, 'deformable' mirrors to accurately point and fire the laser through atmospheric disturbances, and a battle management, command-and-control system that can simultaneously track and prioritise potential targets.
The USAF will operate the ABL fleet, but the MDA has funding responsibility and management authority while the system is under development.
Boeing spent 20 months modifying the 747 test aircraft at its facility in Wichita, Kansas, starting in January 2000. The company leads a contracting consortium called 'Team ABL'. It is also responsible for total weapon system integration and the system's battle management element. Lockheed Martin is developing the beam-control and fire-control segments. TRW is supplying the COIL system and providing ground support.
The aircraft modifications included replacing the aircraft's nose with a turret for the laser and beam-control optics, adding steel struts to reinforce the body and titanium supports to the underbelly and placing an airtight bulkhead in the interior to separate the crew from the aircraft's laser modules.
Final ground tests are under way on the test aircraft, which is dubbed the YAL-1A Attack Laser. It will fly initially without the COIL and beam-control systems, both of which are still undergoing developmental work. USAF Col Ellen Pawlikowski, who heads the ABL system programme office at Kirtland Air Force Base (AFB), New Mexico, on behalf of the MDA, said she does not expect the aircraft to fly with these two components until early 2004.
The flight-test activities will begin with air-worthiness tasks like validating the ability of the aircraft to refuel in the air and land safely, Col Pawlikowski said. Exercises of the aircraft's battle management and infra-red detection sensors will follow to assess the aircraft's ability to distinguish ballistic missiles from aircraft.
Concurrent to the flight activities, Lockheed Martin will continue to assemble and integrate the beam-control system at its facility in Sunnyvale, California. TRW is producing the six flight laser modules (LMs) that will compose the COIL in the test aircraft; the objective ABL aircraft are expected to have 14 LMs. It will integrate them at the ABL System Integration Laboratory at Edwards AFB, California. In January, the company completed a series of tests at its Capistrano Test Site in southern California that validated the ability of the first module, LM-1, to achieve a power level of 118% of its required output.
Programme officials are also working at Edwards AFB to refine the battle management's Active Ranger System, which will sit in a pod atop the aircraft and determine the range to a target.
Once programme engineers have integrated all of these battle management elements on to the test aircraft in early 2004 at Edwards AFB, the YAL-1A will begin engaging a variety of targets ranging from missile-shaped objects dropped from balloons to target boards attached to high-flying aircraft. The flight programme will then culminate in late 2004 with up to three live, end-to-end intercept attempts of 'Scud-like' threat-representative short-range ballistic missiles.
If successful, the aircraft would then undergo additional evaluation as part of the overarching, multi-layered Ballistic Missile Defense System (BMDS) the MDA is pursuing to protect the USA, US forces deployed abroad, and allied and friendly nations from ballistic missile attack. As part of the BMDS developmental activities, Col Pawlikowski expects that the ABL test aircraft would begin engaging missiles with greater ranges. Equally important, the aircraft would also be available as part of the MDA's Block 2004 suite of elements that could provide a limited operational capability in a contingency, she noted.
The USAF wants the ABL to have a lethal range of at least 200 miles (320km). Programme officials say that, under the Bush administration, the ABL's ability to engage missiles of intermediate and even strategic ranges will be determined only by its technical capabilities and not limited by policy restrictions.
Programme officials estimate that the operational ABL system will have enough onboard chemical 'fuel' to shoot down 20 to 40 missiles before having to land to replenish. In addition to missile defence, the ABL will have inherent capabilities to perform other activities like engaging threat aircraft, temporarily blinding enemy satellites, performing imaging surveillance and providing cruise missile defence. Col Pawlikowski noted, however, that the programme is not currently pursuing these other missions.
The cost of the programme since its inception and up through the initial missile shootdown exercises will be under $2 billion, Col Pawlikowski said. The MDA has requested $598 million for ABL in Fiscal Year 2003, including $85 million to initiate the purchase of the second ABL aircraft, known as the Block 2008 variant. It will incorporate improvements over the YAL-1A, but will still be a test aircraft and not a refined operational system.
The size of the ultimate ABL fleet remains to be determined.
Nobody seems to say... Here"'s the FAS page on the topic; Boeing has a web site here. Lots of pretty pictures and nice words, but not a syllable I can find about the range. Maybe they won't know for sure until they get it airborne and try it out, but they must have some goal.
AB
"That wasn't the only change to the ABL 747. The chemical reaction that produces the lethal laser is a violent event, capable of killing anyone nearby, so the revised aircraft's fuselage will be bisected by a solid wall amidships. It's called a "1,000 bulkhead," located 1,000 inches, or roughly 80 feet, from the aircraft's front tip, and will isolate the two pilots and four weapons specialists who make up the crew."
I see dead people.
First, take the stated range and at least double it. A lot of this is fluff designed to mislead the Usual Suspects as to this weapon's true capabilities. The U.S. is basically going to start investing in a fleet of these things, sort of like "airborne battleships". The beam itself will probably be adjustible (that is, narrowed) from your basketball sized shotgun blast to a precision pencil point.
Naturally, that tall, white robed, Arabic-lookin' feller in the turban is history once this thing gets a bead on him.
Be Seeing You,
Chris
Opening sequence of the movie "Real Genius".
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