The firing power inside my crater is enough to annihilate a small army. You can watch it all on TV. It’s the last program you’re likely to see. – You Only Live Twice

According to the New York Times, the Bush administration is seeking to develop a powerful ground-based laser weapon that would use beams of concentrated light to destroy enemy satellites in orbit.

The largely secret project, parts of which have been made public through U.S. Air Force budget documents submitted to Congress in February, is part of a wide-ranging effort to develop space weapons, both defensive and offensive, says The NY Times. No treaty or law forbids such work.

Adaptive Optics, using sensors, computers and flexible mirrors to counteract the atmospheric turbulence, is a key component. The technique reverses the process of atmospheric distortion.

The laser work is relatively inexpensive by government standards – less than $30 million a year through 2011 – partly because no weapons are being built and partly because the work is being done at Starfire Optical Range, at Kirkland Air Force Base in the New Mexico desert (close-up photos).

The Starfire Optical Range is an advanced optical research site that includes three major optical mounts: a 1.0 ­meter beam director, a 1.5 ­meter telescope, and a 3.5 ­meter telescope. All are capable of tracking low ­earth orbit satellites and all are equipped with large ­scale, high ­performance adaptive optical systems.

“The White House wants us to do space defense,” said a senior Pentagon official who oversees many space programs, including the laser effort. Any actual weapons, the official said, “are out there years and years and years into the future.”

Some politicians and experts fault the research as potential fuel for an anti- satellite arms race that could ultimately hurt the United States more than others because it relies so heavily on military satellites, which aid navigation, reconnaissance and attack warning.

The Air Force has pursued the secret research for several years but discussed it in new detail in its budget request. The documents stated that for the 2007 fiscal year, the research will seek to “demonstrate fully compensated laser propagation to low-earth-orbit satellites.”

Federal officials and private experts said the anti-satellite work drew on a body of unclassified advances that have made the Starfire researchers famous among astronomers. Their most important unclassified work centers on using small lasers to create artificial stars that act as beacons to guide the process of atmospheric compensation. A laser guide star adaptive optics system will be used on the 10 meter Keck II Telescope on Mauna Kea, Hawaii.

In 1997, the U.S. military fired a ground-based laser in New Mexico at a U.S. spacecraft, calling it a test of satellite vulnerability. Federal experts said recently that the laser had had no capability to do atmospheric compensation and that the test had failed to do any damage.

The research centers on Starfire’s largest telescope. Its main mirror can gather in faint starlight or, working in the opposite direction, direct powerful beams of laser light skyward.

Air force budget documents call the telescope a “weapon-class beam director.” Unclassified pictures of Starfire in action show a pencil-thin laser beam shooting up from its hilltop observatory into the night sky.

If the Air Force needs “more power” they need look no further than the National Ignition Facility which houses the world’s largest laser system consisting of 192 laser beams that will deliver 1.8 megajoules of ultraviolet light to targets located at the center of its 10-meter diameter target chamber.

NIF’s lasers can also be used to compress and heat BB-sized capsules of hydrogen fusion fuel that will create thermonuclear ignition and energy gain, an important step on the path towards limitless energy production.

NIF is the world’s most energetic laser (partners), and has already delivered record setting energies in the infrared, green and ultraviolet laser beams. When NIF is completed it is expected to be able to create, for a billionth of a second, nearly 1000 times the electric generating power of the entire United States.

Built to support the nation’s Stockpile Stewardship Program, the facility, when completed in 2008, will have over 33,000 square feet of precision optics. The Beam Transport components utilize adaptive optics to eliminate wavefront abberations.

The project is a collaboration of government agencies, national laboratories, universities, and industrial partners under the management of the Department of Energy’s National Nuclear Security Administration and the University of California. This narrated animation describes how the NIF laser incorporates deformable mirrors to correct for optics-induced wavefront abberations.

A space-based optical ring and the ground-to-space component, offer tantalizing backup potential for trans-oceanic fiber. Most satellites are limited to an average of 500Mhz of bandwidth per band, less than most cable television systems which now average 860 MHz. All the world’s satellites combined don’t come close to matching the capacity of one fiber optic cable.

Tyco’s 5 Tbps trans-Pacific cable currently accounts for 40 percent of trans-Pacific capacity and has the ability to upgrade its capacity to potentially account for 85 percent of trans-Pacific capacity.

The house of Tata, as it is respectfully called in India, runs the global show via Singapore-based VSNL International. VSNL is the world’s biggest IP wholesaler. Japan’s SOFTBANK and Microsoft each owned about 15% of Asia Global Crossing, which filed for bankruptcy in 2002. It was acquired by China Netcom the next year and renamed Asia Netcom, another big transpacfic pipe.

In war time, one would have to assume that transoceanic fiber will be cut, perhaps along chock points near cable landing stations. Optical ground stations in high and dry locations like Hawaii, New Mexico and California might provide redundancy as well as higher bandwidth for space-based assets. Of course, clouds can bring a $10B space-based optical network to its knees, making space-to-ground optical technology impractical for the general public.

Trex Enterprises, a leader in adaptive optics, has demonstrated numerous successful missions for the U.S. government since the early 1980′s and their subsidiary, Loea Corporation, has high power E-band (71.0-95.0 GHz) for multi-gigabit wireless for all weather availability using RF. Currently there are Loea radio installations in Hawaii, California, Washington DC, Maryland, New Mexico and Arizona.

The US has created electronic-warfare squads capable of jamming enemy satellite transmissions, reports The Register. Mobile teams are equipped with electronic jamming gear capable of disrupting attempts to interfere with its satellite resources, The Washington Times reports.

The so-called Counter Communications System was declared operational last year at Peterson Air Force Base in Colorado Springs, according to the San Diego Tribune. The ground-based jammer uses electromagnetic radio frequency energy to knock out transmissions on a temporary and reversible basis, without frying components, the command said.

Northrop Grumman is the prime contractor on the CounterCom system, with Harris a major subcontractor. The system is reportedly similar to other ground based electronic warfare gear.

The Directed Energy Directorate at Kirtland AFB in New Mexico, develops high-energy lasers, high-power microwaves and other directed energy technologies (like the microwave e-bomb), for the United States Air Force and the Department of Defense.

Ball Aerospace built the LIDAR for the CALIPSO satellite that launched last week. The LIDAR is designed to scan the atmosphere with green and infrared lasers. A wide-field visible light camera and three-color infrared imaging radiometer is part of the LIDAR instrument to record additional information about clouds and aerosols. Topographic LIDAR produces surface elevation in x, y and z coordinates.

The white NASA promotes feel-good atmospherics. The black NASA could have the real mission – map the atmosphere for space weapons.

In other space news, a Russian reconnaissance satellite was launched from Plesetsk Cosmodrome in northern Russia yesterday and placed in a low polar orbit. While Russian media offered no information on the mission of the satellite, Western observers believe that the spacecraft is an optical reconnaissance satellite of either the Yantar or Kobalt classes. Russian daily news outlet Kommersant, claimed Russia lost its last official spy satellite, called the US-PU, after the Defence Ministry ended communications with the spacecraft.

Related DailyWireless stories include Satellite Jammer?, Pacific Satellites Fail, Intelsat-7 Goes Dark, Rocket Welfare, The NRO’s Radar Imaging Satellite, The $6B Satellite, The $10B Net, Future Combat Systems, Joint Tactical Radio System, Laser Battle Stations, NRO Rides Again, Laser Battle Stations, Dr Good’s Satellite Laser, RF-ID Tracking from Space, Stratellite, Sky High WiFi, Battle Blimps, Spot Beam Satellite Launched, Spaceway Retrogrades, Future Crimes: MATRIX, Billions for Bombs, Internet Satellite on E-Bay and Unwired in Hawaii.

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Posted by Sam Churchill on Thursday, May 4th, 2006 at 2:51 am.