Navy’s Superlaser Is More Than a Weapon

[unhappycamper]

Navy’s Superlaser Is More Than a Weapon
By Spencer Ackerman Email Author
November 10, 2010 | 7:00 am

The Navy is increasingly excited about building a superpowerful laser to shoot down missiles and rockets that might attack its ships. But don’t expect the long-planned Free Electron Laser weapon to replace the guns the Navy stations on its ships — or to be shipboard for years. And definitely expect the laser to do more than just zap stuff out of the sky.

Sure, everyone wants a “death ray,” as the Navy’s chief of research, Rear Admiral Nevin Carr, put it yesterday. But the program manager at the Office of Naval Research for the Free Electron Laser, Quentin Saulter, tells Danger Room that the Navy is looking at “multiple uses, not a single use” for its “Holy Grail” of lasers. And that might lighten the laser’s energy burden.

What would the laser do when it’s not trying to blast a missile out of the sky? “It can be used as a sensor,” Saulter says in an interview during the Office of Naval Research’s science and technology conference in Virginia. “It can be used as a tracker… It can enable kinetic kill systems to be more precise. It can be used for location, time-of-flight location, information exchange, can be used for communications, it can be used for target designation, it can be used for disruption.”

Of course, spending hundreds of millions on another laser tracker might raise eyebrows. But this laser isn’t like others. All lasers work by using energy to charge atoms into generating and then focusing light, requiring a medium — some use crystals, others use chemicals — to filter that light into powerful beams along a particular wavelength. But the Free Electron Laser uses supercharged electron streams to operate along multiple wavelengths, making it more powerful.

Little wonder the Navy’s embarked on an open-ended, $163 million project to develop one into a weapon. Last September, it gave Boeing $26 million task order to develop a prototype design for the laser — the company completed a preliminary design in March — that’ll deliver by early 2012. If it works, the Navy will be on its way to a speed-of-light weapon aboard its ships that won’t have to reload, since it’ll rely on a ship’s energy source for powering up. Not a bad thing if you’re worried about a cruise missile slamming into your hull.

[DCKit]

1. Then it's not a laser, it's an electron gun.

Light = Photons, or so I thought.

[notadmblnd]

2. K. Wasn't there a hooha over some super gun some Middle Eastern leader

was trying to get developed some years ago? Didn't the inventor come up suicides or something to that effect? Why are little pieces of a story to that effect- coming into my head while reading the OP?