Pentagon wants to develop 'directed energy space weapon'

Joe

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Thought this was interesting given belief in the prior use of 'directed energy weapons' at various times over the last number of years, starting with the downing of the Colombia space shuttle Colombia in 2003.


The Pentagon wants to explore the utility of a neutral particle-beam weapon in orbit as a missile defense weapon, according to its 2020 budget proposal. It’s just one of many ways the US is rushing to become the first nation to introduce weapons into space.

It sounds more like a fixture in a science fiction film than something you'd find on the Pentagon's budgetary requests, but the proposal for Fiscal Year 2020's budget includes a $304 million request for funding for a program to develop directed energy weapons that can be deployed in space as a next-generation missile defense system, Defense One reported Thursday.

The problem is, these weapons don't exist right now. That means that first the Pentagon must demonstrate that such a weapon is possible before it can even begin to develop a device usable for missile defense, something it's requested $15 million and six months of time to do. The MIssile Defense Agency (MDA) hopes to have a working weapon in orbit by 2023.

Such a weapon has been built before, and even tested: in 1989, an experiment called BEAR — Beam Accelerator Aboard a Rocket — successfully fired a neutral particle beam into space as part of the US Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI), an attempt to get a leg-up in the Cold War with the USSR by building a space-based missile defense system.

"The 24-foot, 3,500-pound beam accelerator was launched to an altitude of 125 miles on a Minuteman 2 rocket," the Los Angeles Times reported after the July 1989 test. The device, which fired a neutral particle beam into space for four minutes, is now owned by the Smithsonian.

The Times explained how the weapon worked: "The accelerator creates an energized beam of hydrogen atoms carrying no electrical charge. SDI scientists explained that the beam is created by powerful accelerators propelling negative atoms that are stripped of their extra electron as the beam emerges from the device at nearly the speed of light… the beam does not burn through metal but rather penetrates the warhead and then releases its energy."
 
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