The technical challenge of missile defense has been compared with that of hitting a bullet with a bullet. Then there is the still tougher economic challenge of using an expensive interceptor to kill a cheaper target—like hitting a lead bullet with a golden one.
Maybe trouble and money could be saved by shooting down such targets with a laser. Once the system was designed, built, and paid for, the cost per shot would be low. Such considerations led planners at the Pentagon to seek a solution from Lockheed Martin, which has just delivered a 300-kilowatt laser to the U.S. Army. The new weapon combines the output of a large bundle of fiber lasers of varying frequencies to form a single beam of white light. This laser has been undergoing tests in the lab, and it should see its first field trials sometime in 2023. General Atomics, a military contractor in San Diego, is also developing a laser of this power for the Army based on what’s known as the distributed-gain design, which has a single aperture.
This article is part of our special report
Top Tech 2023.
Both systems offer the prospect of being inexpensive to use. The electric bill itself would range “from US $5 to $10,” for a pulse lasting a few seconds, says Michael Perry, the vice president in charge of laser systems for General Atomics.
Why are we getting ray guns only now, more than a century after H.G. Wells imagined them in his sci-fi novel The War of the Worlds? Put it down partly to the rising demand for cheap antimissile defense, but it’s mainly the result of technical advances in high-energy lasers.
The old standby for powerful lasers employed chemical reactions in flowing gas. That method was clumsy, heavy, and dangerous, and the laser itself became a flammable target for enemies to attack. The advantage was that these chemical lasers could be made immensely powerful, a far cry from the puny pulsed ruby lasers that wowed observers back in the 1960s by punching holes in razor blades (at power levels jocularly measured in “gillettes”).
“With lasers, if you can see it, you can kill it.” —Robert Afzal, Lockheed Martin
By 2014, fiber lasers had reached the point where they could be considered for weapons, and one 30-kW model was installed on the USS Ponce, where it demonstrated the ability to shoot down speedboats and small drones at relatively close range. The 300-kW fiber lasers being employed now in the two Army projects emit about 100 kW in optical power, enough to burn through much heftier targets (not to mention quite a few gillettes) at considerable distances.
“A laser of that class can be effective against a wide variety of targets, including cruise missiles, mortars, UAVs, and aircraft,” says Perry. “But not reentry vehicles [launched by ballistic missiles].” Those are the warheads, and to ward them off, he says, you’d probably have to hit the rocket when it’s still in the boost phase, which would mean placing your laser in orbit. Laser tech is still far from performing such a feat.
Even so, these futuristic weapons will no doubt find plenty of applications in today’s world. Israel made news in April by field-testing an airborne antimissile laser called Iron Beam, a play on the name Iron Dome, the missile system it has used to down rockets fired from Gaza. The laser system, reportedly rated at about 100 kW, is still not in service and hasn’t seen combat, but one day it may be able to replace some, if not all, of Iron Dome’s missiles with photons. Other countries have similar capabilities, or say they do. In May, Russia said it had used a laser to incinerate a Ukrainian drone from 5 kilometers away, a claim that Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, derided.
The good and bad of directed-energy weaponsA missile is destroyed by a low-power, 2013 version of Lockheed Martin’s fiber laserwww.youtube.com
Not all ray guns must be lasers, though. In March, Taiwan News reported that Chinese researchers had built a microwave weapon that in principle could be placed in orbit from where its 5-megawatt pulses could fry the electronic heart of an enemy satellite. But making such a machine in the lab is quite different from operating it in the field, not to mention in outer space, where supplying power and removing waste heat constitute major problems.
Because lasers performance falls off in bad weather, they can’t be relied on by themselves to defend critically important targets. They must instead be paired with kinetic weapons—missiles or bullets—to create a layered defense system.
“With lasers, if you can see it, you can kill it; typically rain and snow are not big deterrents,” says Robert Afzal, an expert on lasers at Lockheed Martin. “But a thundercloud—that’s hard.”
Afzal says that the higher up a laser is placed, the less interference it will face, but there is a trade-off. “With an airplane you have the least amount of resources—least volume, least weight—that is available to you. On a ship, you have a lot more resources available, but you’re in the maritime atmosphere, which is pretty hazy, so you may need a lot more power to get to the target. And the Army is in between: It deals with closer threats, like rockets and mortars, and they need a deep magazine, because they deal with a lot more targets.”
In every case, the point is to use expensive antimissile missiles only when you must. Israel opted to pursue laser weapons in part because its Iron Dome missiles cost so much more than the unguided, largely homemade rockets they defend against. Some of the military drones that Russia and Ukraine are now flying wouldn’t break the budget of the better-heeled sort of hobbyist. And it would be a Pyrrhic victory indeed to shoot them from the sky with projectiles so costly that you went broke.
This article appears in the January 2023 print issue as “Economics Drives a Ray-Gun Resurgence .”
Top Tech 2023
Top Tech 2023: A Special ReportPreview exciting technical developments for the coming year.Can This Company Dominate Green Hydrogen?Fortescue will need more electricity-generating capacity than France.An Airship ResurgencePathfinder 1 could herald a new era for zeppelinsA New Way to Speed Up ComputingBlue microLEDs bring optical fiber to the processor.The Personal-Use eVTOL Is (Almost) HereOpener’s BlackFly is a pulp-fiction fever dream with wings.Baidu Will Make an Autonomous EVIts partnership with Geely aims at full self-driving mode.China Builds New Breeder ReactorsThe power plants could also make weapons-grade plutonium.Economics Drives a Ray-Gun ResurgenceLasers should be cheap enough to use against drones.A Cryptocurrency for the Masses or a Universal ID?What Worldcoin’s killer app will be is not yet clear.IBM’s Quantum LeapThe company’s Condor chip will boast more than 1,000 qubits.Arthritis Gets a JoltVagus-nerve stimulation promises to help treat autoimmune disorders.Smartphones Become SatphonesNew satellites can connect directly to your phone.Exascale Comes to EuropeThe E.U.’s first exascale supercomputer will be built in Germany.The Short ListA dozen more tech milestones to watch for in 2023.From Your Site ArticlesWhy Microwave Auditory Effect Crowd-Control Gun Won't Work ›Ray Guns Get Real ›Fiber Lasers Mean Ray Guns Are Coming ›Related Articles Around the WebUS Army toyed with telepathic ray gun | New Scientist ›Raygun - Wikipedia ›
Magazines love to dabble in prognostication, particularly when it comes to emerging technology. Startups show such futuristic pronouncements to potential investors, who in turn use them as data points to inform their bets. And as readers, we gravitate toward them, if only so we can feel superior when, say, a highly anticipated product launch bombs—chef’s kiss to Mark Zuckerberg for the schadenfreude fest that is the metaverse. Think of IEEESpectrum’s annual technology forecast as prognostication filtered through a skeptical lens and years of ongoing coverage of technological advances from lab to market. Each January, we look at projects across the globe and from a range of engineering disciplines that will have major milestones in the coming year. While some technologies flop and fade away, others produce multiple hype cycles that raise and then dash hopes again and again. Take flying cars. Back in 2007, we predicted that the flying-car startup Terrafugia would fail. The company lurched along for years until finally ceasing U.S. operations in 2021, ironically just after receiving a Special Light-Sport Aircraft airworthiness certificate from the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration. But as we wrote in 2014, flying cars are an idea that will not die. And even though the road—or the flight path—to commercial success is riddled with regulatory and social obstacles, eVTOLs (a newer and less sullied, acronym-a-licious moniker for flying cars) have attracted billions of dollars in investment in recent years. And now, the sector seems poised to finally take off, as Editorial Director of Content Development Glenn Zorpette reports in his story about Opener’s BlackFly eVTOL. Flying cars illustrate one path that emerging technologies follow, with innovators and investors taking chances and failing early on. True believers learn from those failures, ultimately leading to solutions that are then brought to market. Sometimes, though, externalities like a changing climate fast-track technologies that have been languishing in development for decades. Back in 2001, Senior Editor Michael J. Riezenman wrote about hydrogen fuel cells as a promising answer to long-haul transportation needs. Back then, the hydrogen economy seemed right around the corner. Fast-forward 22 years and Contributing Editor Peter Fairley reports on two Australian companies that aim to use hydrogen to make a big dent in the country’s greenhouse-gas emissions. One company is using renewable energy to produce hydrogen as fuel for huge trucks to haul zinc ore. The other is developing a new generation of electrolyzers to produce hydrogen for export, although exactly how that will work has yet to be determined. Thank the pressures of the climate crisis for this green-hydrogen boom. Cryptocurrencies, which we’ve been covering since they emerged, have imploded over the last several months. This crypto winter has soured many people on that particular application of blockchain technology, but there are many other, perhaps more promising ways to apply a blockchain. One is as a means of providing proof of personhood, as the journalist Edd Gent explores in his critical look at Worldcoin. The company’s founders want Worldcoin to be not only a global currency that will somehow redistribute wealth via universal basic income but also a secure means of biometric identification, with a dose of buzzy, Web3 facilitation thrown in for good measure. And so, while crypto is tanking and the NFT market has fizzled, something useful may yet rise from the ashes of Web3. I’ll go out on a limb here and predict that Web3 will be recalled in years to come as a figment of some collective pandemic fever dream. Check back in a few years to see how that prognostication pans out. Meanwhile, have some fun with this issue. And for IEEE members, enjoy your exclusive member benefit: online access to our feature archives going back to 2000. Log in to the Spectrum website to trace how technologies like lidar and microLEDs have developed into components that now enable other technologies—a new generation of blimps and optical interconnects for chiplets, respectively—which are also featured in this issue.From Your Site Articles10 Lessons From the Legacy of Apple’s Steve Jobs ›Top Tech 2022: A Special Report ›January 2023 - IEEE Spectrum ›Related Articles Around the WebThe 7 Fundamentals for Succeeding in Innovation ... ›Is There Such A Thing As Too Much Innovation? | On Point ›The eight essentials of innovation | McKinsey ›Keep Reading ↓Show less
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