Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Maryland 20771
ENGINEERING COLLOQUIUM
Monday, November 23, 2009 / 3:30 PM, Building 3 Auditorium
Jeff Hecht
"A Half Century of Laser Weapons"
ABSTRACT -- The then-new ARPA jumped at Gordon Gould's proposal to try to build a laser in 1959, starting a half-century of research into laser weapons. ARPA was chartered to conduct high-risk, high-payoff research, and the quest for high-energy lasers fit perfectly with that mission. Building a laser quickly proved feasible. Achieving weapon-grade power was a much tougher problem. By the mid-1960s, the Pentagon was about to give up when the gas-dynamic laser reached tens of kilowatts. By 1980, big gas lasers could generate a couple of megawatts, but they were too big for the battlefield. Yet lasers still seemed promising for missile defense, and DARPA was studying prospects for space-based anti-missile lasers even before Ronald Reagan's "Star Wars" speech. Once again, reality fell short of project goals, but the Air Force thought big gas laser technology was advanced enough to fit a megawatt-class into a 747 for missile defense. Finished far behind schedule and over budget, the Airborne Laser is now being tested. But the latest hope for laser weapons is solid-state lasers that offer continuous powers of 100 kilowatts, enough to target rockets, artillery and mortars on the battlefield.
SPEAKER -- Jeff Hecht has been writing about lasers and optics for 35 years. He is a contributing editor to Laser Focus World, and writes regularly for New Scientist magazine. He is the author of 11 books, including Understanding Lasers, Beam Weapons: the Next Arms Race, Understanding Fiber Optics, The Laser Guidebook, Beam: The Race to Make the Laser, and City of Light: The Story of Fiber Optics. He also has written for other magazines, including IEEE Spectrum, Optics & Photonics News, and the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists. He holds a B.S. in Electronic Engineering from Caltech. He is a member of the American Physical Society, IEEE, the Optical Society of America, and the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America. His short science fiction stories have been published in Analog Science Fiction and in the "Futures" section of Nature.