The Kansas City Star July 12, 2002
Developing missile system test flight over Wichita
By SCOTT CANON
An airliner given a nose job -- sporting a bulbous new W.C. Fields-like profile later to be stuffed with iffy space-age weaponry -- could take to the skies over Wichita this summer.
The 747 retrofitted by Boeing Co. still needs its futuristic firepower, but as the Airborne Laser aircraft, it could give the Air Force a flying missile killer.
If it works when rigged with target detection and lethal lasers under development by Lockheed Martin and TRW, the plane could zap missiles shortly after they take off -- and before they split into multiple warheads masked amid dozens of decoys.
It may be, experts speculate, the best chance at a missile defense.
A multitude of technical puzzles still need solving -- from overcoming dust in the air to figuring out how to keep a point of light searing into the side of a rocket.
Yet experts suggest that the Airborne Laser holds real promise as a boon to America's command in high-tech weaponry.
"The technical challenge is enormous. There's no guarantee that it will succeed," said Nick Cook, aerospace consultant to Jane's Defence Weekly. "But it's worth the effort, it's one of those rare things that's a real leap-ahead system."
What's more, because the system would punch down a target while it still was zooming upward, it would send the debris from a missile tumbling down to earth near where it took off, rather than where its warheads were aimed.
"That's especially important when you think of missiles carrying weapons of mass destruction," Cook said. "That means the nuclear bomb or the chemical weapons fall on the other guy instead of you."
Trying to strike a missile early in its flight is an obvious, and potentially powerful, idea, said John Pike, a military analyst and director of Globalsecurity.org.
It makes for a more vulnerable, more compact target, he said, and could prove especially useful in controlling a single battlefield for periods of days or weeks. Pike imagines it being used to protect South Korea and Japan, for example, against a North Korean missile attack during times of high tension. "It's not something where you'd have the planes fly 24 hours a day, 365 days a year," he said.
The $1.3-billion Airborne Laser is scheduled for a small-scale test -- a limited-power laser shooting at a missile akin to the Scuds used by Iraq during the 1991 Persian Gulf War -- in late 2004. That's a year later than earlier scheduled.
For now, though, Boeing still needs to see if adding a nearly six-ton laser cannon turret to the front of the jumbo jet and formidable heft to its tail -- creating what company officials sometimes call a "barbell" effect -- dramatically hurts the way it can fly.
In fact, the Airborne Laser project marks the most significant re-engineering to an airframe that carries so much of the world's commercial airline traffic.
This summer, the prototype is scheduled to fly near Wichita to study its new aerodynamics.
"The weight distribution makes it a particularly difficult engineering problem," said Dick Ziegler, a Boeing spokesman.
Only one plane has been ordered so far, underscoring the uncertainty of the technology needed to down a speeding missile.
In theory, a mix of hydrogen peroxide, potassium hydroxide, chlorine gas and water will cook up a basketball-wide beam that will be funneled through the cannon in the plane's bulging nose.
Trained on its target, the laser would heat the skin of a missile -- metal that's already under great stress -- and soften it until the whole thing falls apart.
But making the Airborne Laser work won't be easy.
For starters, the laser beam will only have a range of a few hundred miles before degrading and becoming harmless. That means countries such China and Iran that could station missiles farther within their borders couldn't have their missiles quashed by the aircraft unless the U.S. pilots flew into enemy air space.
The Airborne Laser could have trouble telling the missile apart from its much larger and hotter exhaust plume. And there's talk already of putting a mirror-like reflecting skin on missiles -- military-grade aluminum foil -- to deflect the laser.
Or perhaps putting a spin on the flight of the missile would prevent a laser from stinging a single spot on its side. There also is concern about how lethal a laser would be after traveling through miles of atmospheric dust that refracts its power bit by bit.
Also, the laser wouldn't penetrate clouds, so on some days it could strike a missile only after it reached a certain altitude, leaving less time for the plane and laser to find their fast-moving target.
"It could get annoying if you had thick high cirrus (clouds) that the plane could not get above," Pike said. "Thunderheads could get in the way of a clean shot."
"It would be a real-world weapon, not a movie weapon where everything works right all the time," Pike said. "It's not obviously physically impossible, but it's hard."
That said, he sees it as the most plausible weapon among those under development in the country's missile defense program. Unlike other land-based systems, this one would not violate the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty that the Bush administration has said it will no longer honor.
Boeing's 747-400 airframe, the plane that is set to fly laser-free this summer, likely was chosen because its four-engine design gives it the range and sturdy support needed to haul the huge laser cannon, said Cook, the aerospace analyst.
"In a few decades you might have these lasers on (much smaller) tactical fighters," he said. "For now, what you need is a tremendously large platform."
Copyright 2002
