Raytheon discloses future lasers that can stop hypersonic missiles

https://defence-blog.com/army/raytheon-discloses-future-lasers-that-can-stop-hypersonic-missiles.html

by relaxy • 7 years ago

56 61 7 years ago

jimbob45• 7 years ago

See how we’re hurtling toward lasers that can stop hypersonic missiles.

Sounds like Raytheon is taking the page about concept cars from the car industry and talking about totally conceptual products like they've already shipped.

SamBam2• 7 years ago

Lastly, there’s the “line-of-sight” problem; lasers shoot perfectly straight, meaning a laser shot toward the horizon will eventually hit the Earth’s curves.

Huh, and here I thought the Hollow Earth theory had been discredited, but I guess I might believe Raytheon and its lasers. Cyrus Teed would be so pleased.

gnode4• 7 years ago

I'm not sure what the earth being solid or hollow has to do with this. If you're on the surface of a ball, you can only project a laser / straight line over the hemisphere above you; not through the ground.

As an example, if you're at the North Pole and the South Pole base fires a ballistic missile at you, you can't aim a laser at it, as it would diametrically intersect the Earth.

Instead, you have to wait until the missile passes your horizon. The point at which it does this depends on its altitude. Hypersonic vehicles attempt to make interception harder by reentering the atmosphere from space earlier than a traditional ICBM, and travelling at a lower altitude in their final phase.

chc4• 7 years ago

I think it was a joke. The way the quote was worded makes it sound like the Earth is curving upwards - if you shoot straight to the horizon you'll hit air, not the ground.

jakedata• 7 years ago

Now that really depends on how powerful your laser is, doesn't it?

SamBam2• 7 years ago

The original quote said "a laser shot toward the horizon will eventually hit the Earth’s curves."

No, on a sphere a laser shot towards the horizon will not hit the Earth's "curves."

Shooting towards the horizon is by definition shooting tangentially to the surface you are on. The horizon is the point where the sky meets the land or sea. If you make a straight line from your laser to the horizon, it will continue out into space.

Your explanation of what they meant makes sense: a laser shot towards a distant target, not towards the horizon. But that's not what they said. And, obviously, I did not actually think the fault was the engineers' but the journalist's explanation.

wysifnwyg• 7 years ago

That’s a problem when you’re trying to hit a missile on the other side of the world.

It's certainly an issue when that "other" side is the outside.

yasp• 7 years ago

When it comes to ballistic missile defense, “you want to get it into airborne platforms and into space,” said Evan Hunt, a former U.S. Air Force navigator who now works in business development for Raytheon’s high-energy laser products. “It’s better to look down than to shoot up.”

What about atmospheric interference? (And whatever unfortunate soul might be behind the missile assuming the laser misses.)

dibujante• 7 years ago

Wouldn't there be more atmospheric interference shooting up than down?

Depooty• 7 years ago

I imagine it depends on the altitude of the object the laser is targeting. Say if there was a missile flying along the edge of the mesosphere vs a missile 1 km above ground.

saidajigumi• 7 years ago

This was a main focus of a huge amount of research backing Regan's "SDI" - Strategic Defense Initiative, back in the 80s. [1]

The field of wavefront adaptive optics[2] was a major civilian-side outcome of that work, with eventual impacts on human vision correction (e.g. LASIK, esp. for people w/ major astigmatism) and ground-based astronomy.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strategic_Defense_Initiative

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adaptive_optics#Wavefront_sens...

noobermin• 7 years ago

Atmospheric turbulence, yes, adaptive optics can ameliorate that. A cloud? No, that won't help with that.

cosmie• 7 years ago

with eventual impacts on human vision correction (e.g. LASIK, esp. for people w/ major astigmatism)

That's really neat! I'm a beneficiary of this - with both nearsightedness and major astigmatism, I was told by the ophthalmologist that did my intake for LASIK that there was a non-trivial chance that the surgeon would decline to perform my operation (luckily he was in a confident mood). I went from completely non-functional without glasses to seeing 20/20 in one eye and 20/15 in the other.

While the benefits are diffuse, it's easily one of the top most impactful experiences in my life. It's akin to the feeling of successfully refactoring away a mountain of legacy tech debt that had been getting the job done but bogging you down. Getting rid of the tech debt feels great, but removing the cognitive load of even having to factor it into any decisions anymore just makes things more pleasant.

It's interesting to learn that, indirectly, I owe that to Regan's defense spending.

derekdahmer• 7 years ago

It’s also against international law to put weapons in space.

CamperBob2• 7 years ago

Who's going to stop them? The international police?

sgt101• 7 years ago

Nuclear weapons, yes. But all weapons - clearly not given all the anti sat tests we've seen.

TrainedMonkey• 7 years ago

This bit is specifically about ICBM's, presumably they will be targeted when they are outside of the atmosphere.

Someone2• 7 years ago

You can’t hit an ICBM early in its flight because you won’t have seen it yet/haven’t figured out yet whether it is heading for you. You don’t want to hit it late in its flight because it will be above your territory, and you don’t want to run the risk of dropping radioactive waste there.

In-between, it is over 100km high up (ICBMs reach heights of >1000km. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intercontinental_ballistic_mis...)

gridlockd3• 7 years ago

What? If somebody launches a nuclear ICBM, I don't care where it's heading, I want it downed ASAP, preferably right next to where it launched.

An ICBM also likely isn't going to be above my territory when the propellant drops. After that the tiny missile heads are going to be very hard to hit. That's why you need these laser systems in space (the "Star Wars" program) so you can hit them right after launch.

Lastly, the risk of "dropping radioactive waste" is far lower than the risk of having a nuclear warhead detonate at its target destination.

ohiovr• 7 years ago

Weapons designers will then try to form ablative surfaces that can withstand any practical level of bombardment.

ChuckMcM2• 7 years ago

Adds weight and limits range.

anarazel• 7 years ago

Would probably need a good bit of extra fuel for course corrections too. I'd imagine that a lot of ablative material gassing off on the side close to the earth would have course impact. And influence aerodynamics.

nostrademons2• 7 years ago

For a ballistic or hypersonic missile you need it anyway, to radiate away atmospheric heating.

The challenge with an ABM laser weapon system is generating enough power on-target that it's not just a rounding error for the energy that needs to be dissipated anyway. A quick back-of-the-envelope physics calculation indicates that'll be hard. An 80kg warhead is moving at about 5000 m/s upon re-entry and has a kinetic energy of about 1 GJ. I dunno what fraction of that kinetic energy is converted into thermal energy upon re-entry; for manned spacecraft it's "almost all of it" because they need to go subsonic for parachutes to deploy, but for ballistic missiles, let's guess 1/1000th for ease of math, or 1 MJ. Current laser weapons systems have a range of about 1mi (and the range of lasers is heavily limited by atmospheric considerations - atmospheric refraction will reduce your accuracy, while heating of water vapor, dust, and air can sap the energy). That's about 1/3 of a second on target, so the power output needed is about 3 MW. Current laser weapon systems like the AN/SEQ-3 have a power output of about 30 kW. This needs to scale up by a factor of 100 under conservative assumptions.

Like the article said, the solution to many of these issues is to put the lasers in space and intercept missiles in the boost phase. Then they're moving slower, you're targeting volatile fuel & oxidizer instead of heat shields, and you don't have atmospheric losses to worry about. You do have the issue of how to loft a giant laser, capacitor, and energy source into orbit, though, and how to protect them up there when a conflict starts.

sp332• 7 years ago

Ablating the surface will deflect the missile from its course. Not as good as destroying it but will probably reduce its effectiveness quite a bit.

gnode4• 7 years ago

This isn't much of a problem for a hypersonic glide vehicle; it can correct course.

jandrewrogers• 7 years ago

It won't work.

Most hypersonic weapons already require ablative materials to transit the atmosphere without disintegrating. Ablative shielding is the norm. Even then, a lot of engineering goes into ensuring that ablative loading is carefully controlled during flight -- any significant deviation from the designed ablative loading will cause catastrophic failure. It took decades of research to get to the point where a (non-ballistic) hypersonic missile under normal flight conditions could reliably manage the ablative loading long enough to reach its target. They are literally testing the theoretical limits of material physics.

Massively increasing the external thermal loading of those materials during flight is a great way to kill a hypersonic vehicle. It directly attacks one of their most vulnerable design constraints.

PaulHoule2• 7 years ago

The main trouble with ground-based is clouds, that is what makes you go airborne.

I could picture planes in the air 24-7 circling around vulnerable points, or being dispatched on warning. Either way it would be expensive but would be awesome.

mustacheemperor• 7 years ago

I could picture planes in the air 24-7 circling around vulnerable points

The US previously spent a few billion and 16 years on that exact idea as part of the SDI, before canceling it a few years after the first working tests because, to quote the Defense Secretary,

I don't know anybody at the Department of Defense who thinks that this program should, or would, ever be operationally deployed. The reality is that you would need a laser something like 20 to 30 times more powerful...there's nobody in uniform that I know who believes that this is a workable concept[0]

If the laser power was a problem, maybe Raytheon's tech will make the concept more plausible. The wikipedia article says there's been some additional experimentation mounting lasers on UAVs since the program was cancelled.

[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boeing_YAL-1

PaulHoule2• 7 years ago

There is terminal defense against ICBMs and there is midcourse defense against hypersonics.

The ballistic warhead has little more to do than absorb the heat of reentry in the terminal phase. The energy to destroy it would be a good fraction of the energy that was in the rocket to begin with.

The hypersonic weapon on the other hand has to have sensors, effectors, and be unable to complete it's mission after receiving less beamed energy.

The airborne laser was killed not because it wasn't powerful enough (for some mission) but because the chemical laser it used was dangerous, expensive and otherwise impractical. The air force knew the army was developing modular fiber lasers so they decided to wait for that before building another platform, which could also be used against everything from drones to small ballistic missiles.

Hypersonic is just the cherry on top.

The alternative for interception hypersonics would be the nuclear-tipped ABMs of old, since the maneuvering capability of hypersonics defeats "hit-to-kill".

fmakunbound• 7 years ago

takes bigger optical mirrors with coatings that withstand such a massive amount of energy

What of missiles coated the same way?

thefounder• 7 years ago

So this means we should expect big wars in Europe again? Without nukes the deterrent will no longer exist.

jsty• 7 years ago

You'd also have to consider the likelihood of one getting through your laser defences, and what the cost of protecting your country with these would be.

If you have a 99% chance of stopping a missile, but your adversary has tens or hundreds of thousands of missiles to fire at you, those aren't great odds.

Plus in a pinch, modern societies could probably come up with some fairly hideous deterrent weapons that didn't require missile delivery.

b_tterc_p• 7 years ago

That’s a good point, and in fact probability of error doesn’t even need to come into play. If you can destroy 10 missiles per second with probability 1, then you have a 0% chance of stopping 11 missiles at once. Massive simplifications here but the point stands. Scale matters.

mrec• 7 years ago

No Latin American countries have nukes, and despite spending most of the 19th century beating the stuffing out of each other on a regular basis [1] there's been almost zero inter-state violence since WW2.

Modern Russia is also nowhere near the unstoppable conventional military juggernaut that the Cold War-era USSR was.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_conflicts_in_South_Ame...

angel_j• 7 years ago

Great, so maybe one attack vector is defended, and that of 2nd-rate States trying to lob 80 year old technology.

Missile defense has been in development for decades, and it never works. By the time it does, missiles will look like cross-bow bolts on the warfare menu.

Military spending is the elephant in the economy.

gnode4• 7 years ago

I don't see why such lasers would require high power. Couldn't an array of smaller lasers be used instead? It seems to me this would also counteract blooming and add redundancy. If using microwave / radio radiation instead, a phased array would allow the system to be instantly and multiply targetable.

drinane• 7 years ago

The production value of that video had me gut busting in laughs... did they pull an PS1 intro video from strike series or something lol

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qyQ5Jf7cpLY

Taniwha2• 7 years ago

Doesn't this just turn a targeted nuclear strike on a city into a dirty bomb strike on a city?

Taniwha2• 7 years ago

Or possibly a chemical attack using vaporized plutonium

akeck2• 7 years ago

Slightly off topic, but one of the weapons I fear the most is a non-visible spectrum anti-personnel laser.

gridlockd3• 7 years ago

Pretty far down my list, compared to MIRVs.

Also, it's not like you're going to see the bullet hitting your head, or the landmine that'll blow you up, or the IED that you tripped over. Not until it's too late, anyway.

nine_k• 7 years ago

Bullets are already close to that: invisible, long-range, and shot from very compact, inexpensive weapons, compared to lasers.

akeck2• 7 years ago

The thing that scares me is the silence.

averros• 7 years ago

The future missiles are going to be shiny.

As in "mirrors".

The BIG SECRET of directed energy weaponry is that there's a very simple and cheap method of reducing absorbed energy by orders of magnitude - reflect it in arbitrarty directions (or even towards the source if one wants to be naughty).

The sensors (which have to absorb EM radiation to function) are vulnerable, but can be easily protected by shutters for the duration of attack. Modern inertial navigation units are well capable of providing precise guidance without any external data.

StrangeDoctor• 7 years ago

Just have a wide range of frequencies you can use, every material absorbs some part of the EM spectrum

A2017U1• 7 years ago

An ablative covering negates this.

Hope they have enough time to aim in the same spot.

waste_monk• 7 years ago

This already exists somewhat (e.g. antiflash white paint on aircraft expecting to operate in a nuclear conflict area) but given that today's environment seems to favour stealth (you can't lase something you haven't detected yet, and considering how fast these missiles move the trade-off in survivability vs. detection time and thus time for the target to acquire, track, and shoot down the hypersonic missile is probably not worth it) I doubt mirrored missiles will come into fashion.

But, I am very much an "airchair" weapons technologist so I'd be interested in seeing arguments for the contrary!

nitwit005• 7 years ago

Isn't there going to be a pretty short list of targets that are more valuable than the missiles themselves? I can see an aircraft carrier making sense, but it feels like there are cheaper ways to blow up most other targets.

abdulhaq• 7 years ago

As a civilian, when we get lasers to take out everyone in the weapons business, I'll celebrate.

Raytheon discloses future lasers that can stop hypersonic missiles

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