AirBorne Laser

[Dominus]

Su RID davano per morto questo programma insieme a quello dei KEI...

[Ospite intruder]

Su RID davano per morto questo programma insieme a quello dei KEI...

 

 

RID non è infallibile, la lista di errori che hanno fatto in materia di previsioni è piuttosto imbarazzante e varia.

[Ospite intruder]

ABL Team Argues For More Testing Funds

 

Jun 18, 2009

 

 

 

By Michael Bruno aviationweek.com

 

 

 

Airborne Laser (ABL) industry executives are suggesting even more money in the FY ’10 Pentagon budget request and beyond is needed to fully prove their program’s military effectiveness, despite high-level Defense Department actions lately downgrading the embattled missile defense effort.

 

In a teleconference with reporters June 17, Boeing ABL Program Director Mike Rinn stressed that the Boeing-led industry team would like the opportunity and funding to show what they are convinced is ABL’s wider application. “We’re interested in going beyond the boost phase,” he said. “We see tremendous potential in what we’re doing.”

 

Still, Rinn acknowledged that a future ABL fleet, if pursued, may not resemble the modified Boeing 747-400 freighter that serves as the test aircraft now. A key challenge would be adapting the massive chemical oxygen iodine laser (COIL) to another platform, particularly one smaller than the 747, as defense officials have suggested since Defense Secretary Robert Gates announced this spring that the program was being limited to a research effort. Rinn said the erstwhile Tail 2, or second aircraft, which Gates is sidelining, was expected to help cut some weight and other aspects of the COIL.

 

But that was also eyed as a five-year effort, if not longer, in part because of the time it takes to build what was planned to be a 747-800. Rinn said the longer a Tail 2 is delayed, the more worried executives get about program suppliers disappearing. And a leap ahead in technology to shrink the COIL for an aircraft a fraction of the 747 was “probably not” going to happen, Rinn explained.

 

Meanwhile, the first of four congressional committees to weigh in on ABL’s future has sided with the Obama administration’s moves and 2010 request for $187 million. The House Armed Services Committee, controlled along with all of Congress by the Democrats, rejected several conservative members’ efforts to boost funding for ABL and other revamped missile defense programs like the intercontinental Ground-based Midcourse Defense system.

 

In their committee markup this week, Republicans said the technology needed to be pursued for its potential military requirement. Democrats responded that that is what they are doing by following Gates’ recommendation, and that nearer-term and theater-based threats need to be better addressed.

[TT-1 Pinto]

In naftalina ....

 

Fonte: AviationWeek.com

 

Lights Out For The Airborne Laser

 

By Amy Butler (Dec. 21, 2011)

 

 

After nearly 16 years of development and more than $5 billion spent, culminating in a series of ballistic missile target engagements, the Pentagon has finally decided to mothball the Boeing-led 747-400F project known as the Airborne Laser.

 

The U.S. Missile Defense Agency is now looking toward a new generation of lasers that could operate on unmanned vehicles at very high altitudes owing to advancements in laser technology, power generation and beam control work made possible in part by the foundation laid in the ABL years.

 

The program was established by the U.S. Air Force in the 1990s with an aim of employing a multi-megawatt-class chemical oxygen iodine laser (COIL) to burn through the propulsion systems of boosting ballistic missile targets, sending the rockets and their potentially lethal payloads raining back down upon the area from which they were launched.

 

Despite finally shooting down its first target last year, ABL has cratered under the substantial funding required for its work, cost-prohibitive and improbable employment scenarios and, most recently, pressure on the Pentagon budget resulting from growing national debt.

 

Though ABL found itself on death row awaiting termination multiple times in the past decade, the industry team and MDA, which took over management of the program in 2001, managed to keep it alive. Finally, in February 2010, the ABL engaged and destroyed its first test target — a solid-rocket fueled Terrier Black Brant rocket. This was followed just more than a week later by another shootdown, this time of a liquid-fueled foreign missile target.

 

MDA Director Army Lt. Gen. Patrick O’Reilly is now focused on a new generation of laser systems with “much denser capability or greater power lasers in smaller packages and operating at much higher altitudes,” he told a gathering hosted by the Huntsville, Ala., Chamber of Commerce Dec. 12. This, he says, will simplify future designs.

 

“We do believe we are very close … within a few years of having a prototype that will actually operate out of an unattended air vehicle at very high altitudes,” O’Reilly said. “We basically have a horse race going on between several different technologies [and] all of them are very promising.” He predicts that “we have that capability to achieves something with a very high-altitude UAV over this decade.”

 

Details of this project were not provided by MDA.

 

Advances since the start of ABL in electric-powered solid-state lasers, however, are likely where the future lies if scientists manage to solve the problem of generating enough power for the lasers to have operational benefit at significant ranges and fired from small, mobile platforms.

 

Retaining skills

 

Meanwhile, not all of ABL is lost or mothballed. Boeing has recommended that MDA retain 20 engineers and scientists versed in beam control/fire control, jitter and platform dynamics disciplines “to ensure transfer of knowledge and lessons to future high-power directed-energy programs.

 

With the official demise of ABL, Boeing’s position in the missile defense market is even more dependent on its precarious, and potentially short-term, control of the Ground Based Midcourse Defense (GMD) ballistic missile shield program, which includes a global network of sensors and interceptors in Alaska and California.

 

MDA is competing the work, which has been exclusively handled by Boeing, and a source selection between Boeing/Northrop Grumman and Lockheed Martin/Raytheon is expected as soon as this month.

 

Given ABL’s end, if Boeing loses the GMD contract the company could find itself going from the prominent missile defense integrator in the U.S. to a mere supplier to its onetime rivals.

 

[pilota01]

Ragazzi scusate una curiosità : il Boeing 747-400F può abbattere ogni tipo di bersaglio aereo?

[gepiro66]

In teoria credo che fosse i gradi di abbattere qualunque bersaglio.

se non ricordo male, è stato testatao in poligono anche contro bersagli al suolo.

Nella realtà, comunque, non credo che il sistema fosse dotato dell'agilità per inseguire, per esempio, un bersaglio in manovra con alte velocità angolari rispettop al vettore, inoltre la rifrazione causata dall'umidità nei bassi strati dell'atmosfera ne dobvrebbe ridurre di molto l'efficacia e la portata a bassa media quota.

Il sistema era nato e ottimizzato per colpire a partire da quote stratosferiche le testate missilistiche nemiche durante la traiettoria balistica, prima del rientro nell'atmosfera, e in quel campo di utilizzo poteva essere più efficace.

[Alpino]

In teoria credo che fosse i gradi di abbattere qualunque bersaglio.

se non ricordo male, è stato testatao in poligono anche contro bersagli al suolo.

Nella realtà, comunque, non credo che il sistema fosse dotato dell'agilità per inseguire, per esempio, un bersaglio in manovra con alte velocità angolari rispettop al vettore, inoltre la rifrazione causata dall'umidità nei bassi strati dell'atmosfera ne dobvrebbe ridurre di molto l'efficacia e la portata a bassa media quota.

Il sistema era nato e ottimizzato per colpire a partire da quote stratosferiche le testate missilistiche nemiche durante la traiettoria balistica, prima del rientro nell'atmosfera, e in quel campo di utilizzo poteva essere più efficace.

 

Veramente io so che era concepito per colpire i missili durante la fase di boost, quando ancora stavano bruciando propellente.

[gepiro66]

Veramente io so che era concepito per colpire i missili durante la fase di boost, quando ancora stavano bruciando propellente.

 

Hai ragione, ma immagino che tra i tempi per l'individuazione e tracciamento del bersaglio e l'ingresso nel raggio di portata utile del sistema l'intercettazione dovesse per forza di cose avvenire nella porzione esoatmosferica della traiettoria balistica, anche se ancora durante la fase propulsiva.

[TT-1 Pinto]

I Russi ci riprovano ....

 

Russia to resume work on airborne laser ASAT ....

 

Russia will be resuming work on its airborne laser anti-satellite system, according to a defense industry source quoted by Izvestia. The new system will be based on the Sokol Eshelon system that includes a laser, 1LK222, deployed on the A-60 aircraft (a modification of Il-76).

Fonte .... http://russianforces.org/blog/2012/11/russia_to_resume_work_on_airbo.shtml