Lockheed Martin will scale its combat laser technology to a 500 kW-class laser. It will be the most powerful laser Lockheed Martin has produced, topping its 300 kW-class laser power level developed under a contract from the Department of Defense’s Office of the Under Secretary of Defense for Research & Engineering, OUSD (R&E). The 500 kW-class laser, developed under a new contract just awarded by OUSD (R&E), is the second phase of the High Energy Laser Scaling Initiative (HELSI).
The U.S. Army is working through a variety of challenges with directed-energy weapons for air defense, including how to affordably manufacture the high-tech capability and sustain it on the battlefield.
This contract is worth about $221 million for development alone.
A 2019 report by New Mexico’s Galaxy Advanced Engineering suggests that a megawatt range combat laser (1,000 kW) would be needed toi short down an airplane. This would out about 5000 joules per square centimeter. Less powerful lasers, however, might be able to disable specific thin-skinned targets such as an airplane’s sensors, optics, and related devices.
This phase of HELSI aims to increase the laser’s power level while achieving excellent beam quality and optimizing efficiency, size, weight, and volume for the continuous-wave high energy laser sources. Proving this capability will reduce risk for the Department of Defense acquisition and fielding of high-powered laser weapon systems for all six military branches.
Iron Beam Combat Laser
In 2022, US defense contractor Lockheed Martin signed an agreement with the Israeli Rafael weapons manufacturer to join the development of a high-powered laser interception system, dubbed Iron Beam. Israel has a 100 kilowatt Iron Beam combat laser. Iron Beam is expected to be deployed by the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) by 2024.
Terrorist groups in the Gaza Strip can launch rockets for less than US$1,000. The Tamir interceptor used for Iron Dome is said to cost about US$50,000, and a Patriot missile goes up to US$3 million per piece. The cost of one interception with Iron Beam laser would be much cheaper, with some reports suggesting US$2,000.
Limits of Combat Lasers
Iron Beam still faces a series of technological issues that constrain its operational relevance.
1. weather conditions significantly affect its ability to operate. The sensors of Iron Beam are said to work effectively in optimal conditions such as a sunny and cloudless day, but less so in cases of rain and clouds. This questions the choice of relying on a system that could be made suddenly – and quite randomly – inefficient. Israel has a Mediterranean climate. Weather problems would mostly be an issue during the winter season. Southeast Asian countries have ten times more rain which would reduce combat laser use and effectiveness.
2. the range of the interception. Laser energy is absorbed by molecules and aerosols in the atmosphere and eventually loses power. This means that the system, as of today, could only destroy rockets at short range (reportedly less than 10 km).
3. Another major limitation relates to the pace of intervention. The process of generating a laser beam may take only a few seconds but that makes the system slower than Iron Dome and less effective when facing a salvo of rockets.
Israel has successfully tested the new “Iron Beam” laser interception system.
This is the world’s first energy-based weapons system that uses a laser to shoot down incoming UAVs, rockets & mortars at a cost of $3.50 per shot.
It may sound like science fiction, but it's real. pic.twitter.com/nRXFoYTjIU
— Naftali Bennett בנט (@naftalibennett) April 14, 2022
Brian Wang is a Futurist Thought Leader and a popular Science blogger with 1 million readers per month. His blog Nextbigfuture.com is ranked #1 Science News Blog. It covers many disruptive technology and trends including Space, Robotics, Artificial Intelligence, Medicine, Anti-aging Biotechnology, and Nanotechnology.
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Can the missiles be reflectively coated to disperse the energy the laser emits? Is there a way to magnify the energy delivered by pulsing the discharge?
For any single known bandwidth, you can make a reflector for that pretty well, as long as the reflector is in the right temperature range as well. For instance, room temperature Aluminum reflects red and infrared *very* well! It sucks up high ultraviolet like a sponge. So, raise part of the reflector’s temperature above 400ºC with an ultraviolet laser, and then watch the Aluminum suck up the higher power and more efficient infrared laser like that proverbial sponge as well. Different materials, different bandwidths and temperature ranges.
A laser in orbit of Jupiter.
Use for com’s, but also to push sails back to Earth after they’ve made a trip or two through a moon plume.
Stuff sticks into an aerofoam on the “cool” side, laser kicks it on the “hot” side.
Sample returns in a steady stream.
I really like this concept for replacing the C-RAM units, especially in population dense areas. Those C-RAMs are cool as hell but that’s a lot of lead going down range and it’s gonna fall somewhere and do damage.
That would require _Real Genius_!
I think they need, want something to combat drone swarms, to shut them down cheap and fast, not to waste expensive missiles. Light travels faster than supersonic missiles, so coupled with good pointing software lasers could shut down lots of missiles,…
if the weather cooperates
Like potential bad weather is the reason to use missiles all the time and not progress. Good thinking.
Even if bad weather decreases the range in short one can still be effective or go orbital.
Sensitive.
I think it is more a solution looking for a problem. Congress never met a weapons system they wouldn’t throw $100B at, even when ultimately abandoned like rail gun, comanche helicopter, crusader howitzer, littoral combat catamarans, etc.
These lasers though… nice incremental improvement… this one could bring a liter of water to boil in a second… if water were black.
And there US still has some functioning military? I guess they dont listen to guy(“Atomstroy “”expert?”””) who said Iris(scam artist) is a good scientist based on few tweets and his laser “expertisms”.
Many years ago ( I’m thinking 20 years) AW&ST had an article on beam weapons & directed energy weapons and what was happening with R & D. 2 or 3 programs were unclassified and the remaining 12-14 programs were classified. That’s what I remember. My suspicion is DOE has developed and is developing directed energy weapons that use some form of nuclear energy and won’t ever talk about it or even hint at it. Ed Teller wanted to use atomic bombs with lasing rods in orbit as part of SDI. A laser needs to be in multi-megawatts of power to be a decent battlefield weapon.
A laser or particle beams have to be able to melt a main battle tank in seconds from miles away to be a useful weapon. Nuclear energy is the only way forward,
DoD knows this too.
excited dimer laser was demonstrated first during an undergound detonation. hit anything hard enough and it will ‘lase’.
fission product pumping of a noble + halogen gas mixture is as straightforward as the LASIK excimer type with electrical discharge in gas chamber.
I don’t know much about lasers, but I do figure you could make a reactor core out of a 3 meter bundle of mirrored fluorescent light tubes where the “phosphor” is actinide oxide. You could millisecond pulse such a thing indefinitely so long as you limited the temperature rise to something on the order of what a tanning salon light bulb sees.
just saying. might work nicely in orbit. could probably start fires in Quebec or Hawaii with it – JK.
Of course more than half the fission products (nearly all xrays and neutrons) would deposit their energy the structure, but several tens of percent would be delivered to the gas in the many parallel cavities (quartz tubes?) assuming a thin coating like the fluorescent tube “phosphor”. One could use PVD metalized actinide coating also, but a critical parameter is inertness to diatomic and ionized halogen gas. Isn’t it funny how the natural configuration of a reactor, at least a manageable and useful one, always comes down to rods?
Ultimately it has to be robust, deployable, maintainable, and affordable. But have to start somewhere.
“This questions the choice of relying on a system that could be made suddenly – and quite randomly – inefficient.”
Pretty clearly you would not rely on this alone but would integrate it in to your air defense. Certainly you will still need traditional ballistic missile defense systems.
Still will be nice to be able to know when drones and missiles are incoming based off of advance weather forecasts.
Where is the common sense?
Fire at the most vulnerable parts tha twill derail it’s flight path the fastest….
Another use for ambient conditions superconductors (in form of accumulator coils): Multimegawatt combat pulsed lasers