FYI,

"Administration Conducting Research Into Laser Weapon"
New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/05/03/washington/03laser.html?
ei=5094&en=d7c1adf7a14592f1&hp=&ex=1146715200&partner=homepage&pagewa
nted=print

The Bush administration is seeking to develop a powerful ground-
based laser weapon that would use beams of concentrated light to
destroy enemy satellites in orbit.

The largely secret project, parts of which have been made public
through Air Force budget documents submitted to Congress in
February, is part of a wide-ranging effort to develop space weapons,
both defensive and offensive. No treaty or law forbids such work.

The laser research is far more ambitious than a previous effort by
the Clinton administration nearly a decade ago to test an
antisatellite laser. It would take advantage of an optical technique
that uses sensors, computers and flexible mirrors to counteract the
atmospheric turbulence that seems to make stars twinkle.

The weapon would essentially reverse that process, shooting focused
beams of light upward with great clarity and force.

Though futuristic and technically challenging, the laser work is
relatively inexpensive by government standards — about $20 million
in 2006, with planned increases to some $30 million by 2011 — partly
because no weapons are as yet being built and partly because the
work is being done at an existing base, an unclassified government
observatory called Starfire in the New Mexico desert.

In interviews, military officials defended the laser research as
prudent, given the potential need for space arms to defend American
satellites against attack in the years and decades ahead. "The White
House wants us to do space defense," said a senior Pentagon official
who oversees many space programs, including the laser effort. "We
need that ability to protect our assets" in orbit.

The Air Force has pursued the secret research for several years but
discussed it in new detail in its February budget request. The
documents stated that for the 2007 fiscal year, starting in October,
the research will seek to "demonstrate fully compensated laser
propagation to low earth orbit satellites."

The documents listed several potential uses of the laser research,
the first being "antisatellite weapons."

The overall goal of the research, the documents said, is to assess
unique technologies for "high-energy laser weapons," in what
engineers call a proof of concept. Previously, the laser work
resided in a budget category that paid for a wide variety of space
efforts, the documents said. But for the new fiscal year, it has
moved under the heading "Advanced Weapons Technology."

In interviews, Pentagon officials said the policy rationale for the
arms research dated from a 1996 presidential directive in the
Clinton administration that allows "countering, if necessary, space
systems and services used for hostile purposes."

In 1997, the American military fired a ground-based laser in New
Mexico at an American spacecraft, calling it a test of satellite
vulnerability. Federal experts said recently that the laser had had
no capability to do atmospheric compensation and that the test had
failed to do any damage.

Little else happened until January 2001, when a commission led by
Donald H. Rumsfeld, then the newly nominated defense secretary,
warned that the American military faced a potential "Pearl Harbor"
in space and called for a defensive arsenal of space weapons.

The Starfire research is part of that effort.

Federal officials and private experts said the antisatellite work
drew on a body of unclassified advances that have made the Starfire
researchers world-famous among astronomers. Their most important
unclassified work centers on using small lasers to create artificial
stars that act as beacons to guide the process of atmospheric
compensation.

When astronomers use the method, they aim a small laser at a point
in the sky close to a target star or galaxy, and the concentrated
light excites molecules of air (or, at higher altitudes, sodium
atoms in the upper atmosphere) to glow brightly.

Distortions in the image of the artificial star as it returns to
Earth are measured continuously and used to deform the telescope's
flexible mirror and rapidly correct for atmospheric turbulence. That
sharpens images of both the artificial star and the astronomical
target.

Unclassified pictures of Starfire in action show a pencil-thin laser
beam shooting up from its hilltop observatory into the night sky.

The Starfire researchers are now investigating how to use guide
stars and flexible mirrors in conjunction with powerful lasers that
could flash their beams into space to knock out enemy satellites,
according to federal officials and Air Force budget documents.

"These are really smart folks who are optimistic about their
technology," said the senior Pentagon official. "We want those kind
of people on our team."

But potential weapon applications, he added, if one day
approved, "are out there years and years and years into the future."

The research centers on Starfire's largest telescope, which Air
Force budget documents call a "weapon-class beam director." Its main
mirror, 11.5 feet in diameter, can gather in faint starlight or,
working in the opposite direction, direct powerful beams of laser
light skyward.

Federal officials said Starfire's antisatellite work had grown out
of one of the site's other military responsibilities: observing
foreign satellites and assessing their potential threat to the
United States. In 2000, the Air Force Research Laboratory, which
runs Starfire, said the observatory's large telescope, by using
adaptive optics, could distinguish objects in orbit the size of a
basketball at a distance of 1,000 miles.

Another backdrop to the antisatellite work is Starfire's use of
telescopes, adaptive optics and weak lasers to track and illuminate
satellites. It is considered a baby step toward developing a laser
powerful enough to cripple spacecraft.

Col. Gregory Vansuch, who oversees Starfire research for the Air
Force Research Laboratory, said in an interview that the facility
used weak lasers and the process of atmospheric compensation to
illuminate satellites "all the time." Such tests, Colonel Vansuch
emphasized, are always done with the written permission of the
satellite's owner.

He said that about once a month, Starfire conducted weeklong
experiments that illuminate satellites up to 20 times.

Mark Reiff