San Francisco Chronicle April 16, 2010
Laser in limbo mirrors tech weapons decline
By Tom Abate
Two football-size mirrors stored in a spotless warehouse in Sunnyvale reflect the fortunes of Lockheed Martin Space Systems Co. and Silicon Valley's aerospace and defense sector.
Coated with special reflective treatments, these mirrors were designed to aim the energy beam created by a massive airborne laser to destroy a missile before it could roar into space.
But the Obama administration has put the Airborne Laser Test Bed on hold, turning it into an experimental project instead of buying additional systems from its three main contractors: Lockheed, which created the aiming system, Northrop Grumman, developer of the laser, and Boeing, which packaged the weapons system in a special airplane.
Job losses
As a result, a project that had employed 350 Lockheed workers at its peak in 2000, and roughly 200 employees before Obama, now has a staff of 110.
"By the end of the year we'll be at 60 people," said Douglas Graham, a vice president at the Lockheed division running the program.
"The fate of the airborne laser is somewhat emblematic of how the Pentagon views California and Silicon Valley as sources for science-based systems," said Loren Thompson, a defense analyst with the Lexington Institute, a think tank in Washington.
Thompson said defense planners want high-tech contractors to keep generating ideas, but with the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq sapping the defense budget, costly weapons like the airborne laser may not get deployed.
Overextended
Defense critic John Pike of GlobalSecurity.org gave the same notion a different spin. "The Pentagon is famous for starting more programs than it could possibly fund," he said.
Lockheed is one of the foundations of the defense sector in Silicon Valley, which took off during the Cold War by designing high-tech, high-ticket systems for the military.
Lockheed opened its Sunnyvale facility in 1956 to build fleet ballistic missiles and surveillance satellites. By 1990, the division's employment had peaked at 26,500 people.
But by then the Berlin Wall had fallen, and as the United States cut defense spending, employment at Sunnyvale fell. By 2000, the local division was down to 6,941 people. Employment rose in the wake of 9/11 to 7,984 by the end of the George W. Bush era. Today Lockheed Martin Space Systems employs 7,700 people in Sunnyvale.
On a tour of the Sunnyvale site, Lockheed's Graham characterized the airborne laser as a success. He also cast the administration's decision to keep it in an experimental mode in a favorable light.
Graham said the weapon proved itself during a test mission in February, when the airborne laser destroyed an unarmed ballistic missile as it boosted toward space. Many of the details remain classified but Graham said the laser is designed to deliver a basketball-size beam of intense heat over a distance of hundreds of kilometers.
"It's kind of like 'Star Wars' except that it works," he said.
But that success came too late. Last April, Defense Secretary Robert Gates cited "affordability and technology problems" as justifications for reducing the program, which has cost roughly $5 billion since its inception in the 1990s, to R&D status.
Work on aim
Graham said the main problem was the laser. To achieve the intense energies required, the laser used massive chemical reaction chambers, roughly the size of six SUVs, parked aboard the aircraft. Graham said the Pentagon continues to fund research into more compact solid-state lasers that would be more practical to deploy.
Meanwhile, the test bed will allow Lockheed to refine and improve its aiming system. "Between five and 10 years out I believe we will have a wide range of laser weapons," he said.
© Copyright 2010, Hearst Communications Inc.
