Airborne Laser Answers

A Lockheed Martin official this morning gave more details on the reasons why a pair of Airborne Laser Test Bed intercept attempts of a boosting ballistic missile target went awry last year.

During one attempt, the problem "involved a software issue in our beam control, fire control system that has since been corrected and the other one involved an issue with a valve on a laser subsystem," Doug Graham, vice president of advanced programs at Lockheed's Strategic and Missile Defense Systems business unit, said, adding: "Both of those have been corrected. We've got missions planned for this year, in which we'll be able to validate the corrective actions we've implemented to fix those anomalies."

When asked about the software glitch, Graham said:

We basically had an error in a single frame of software that occurred at a critical time that could have happened literally like a millisecond earlier or a millisecond later and it would have had no impact on our ability to engage and destroy the target. And so that required us to make a relatively straightforward software fix. It hadn't manifested itself in any of the previous flights that we'd done, and we have since done a whole bunch of testing in our software development lab here and on the aircraft down at Edwards [Air Force Base, CA] to convince ourselves that that's not gonna happen again.

As Inside Missile Defense reported in November:

Despite the fact that ALTB did manage to shoot down a boosting missile target last February, under its current form the Airborne Laser does not reflect a weapon the military could realistically use, according to Air Force Chief of Staff Gen. Norton Schwartz.

While the intercept "was a magnificent technological achievement . . . the reality . . . is that this does not reflect something that is operationally viable," Schwartz said at a Feb. 23 House Armed Services Committee hearing. The general added that the future of military laser technology is in solid-state lasers and not the chemical-based one that was carried aboard the ABL.

"The real innovation there is essentially to use that platform as a way to test high-powered laser concepts," Zachary Lemnios, director of the Pentagon's Defense Research and Engineering office, said in a Feb. 23 interview. "And we have a joint technology office that's looking at the technical strategy for how we might use that: What's the right technical thread? We went out to see the ABL about a month ago at Edwards [Air Force Base, CA]. It's a remarkable platform. You sort of have to look at it like a nuclear submarine. It is high-power optics. This enormous power supply with an enormous laser in the back end, but it's also a chemical plant."

Lemnios called ABL "a very complex intersection of a combination of high-power laser optics, control systems -- much of which could be used for other than just high-power lasing. It could be used for alternate test beds for other concepts that we're looking at. So we have the joint technology office that's actually looking at that jointly with [the Missile Defense Agency] and the services to try to map that path forward."