Missile Defense

Some facts are useful as guides to the possible, however...

Okay, Robert show why tracking a flaming rocket booster at say 10,000 km distance would be impossible for the space telescope but tracking and photographing a disintegrating asteroid out by the orbit of Jupiter, about 778,000,000 km would be possible?

We both know that's an "apples and oranges" question, just as it was when you first proposed it...

Language has an unfunny characteristic -- that is, it in nonquanitative -- so, as any academic knows, people can quibble forever.

We're talking here about huge costs and huge risks to the world...

Let me add a fact that I believe a loyal United States citizen should be permitted to post...

" It can be truly said that you can't make what you can't measure. . ...

If I remember, the lasar "hot spot" to take out a ballistic missile on boost phase has to be on target for the order of a second (ON THE SAME SPOT) -- would you care to comment on how "easy" it is to get that resolution (say 1 cm) over the distances involved, from a moving platform (plane or satellite) shooting at a moving target?

If the distance is 100 km, isn't this a target of 10e-7 radians diameter, that is moving ? Shot at from a moving platform with some degree of vibration and "unwelcome motion" to be compensated for?..

-- "The head of the Pentagon's missile defense program warned Congress today that accelerating development of a missile shield without a major infusion of money would be a mistake. http://www.nytimes.com/2001/06/15/world/15MISS.html

And the money would be a mistake, if the technology and the strategic consequences are not both subject to real scrutiny.

Strategically, this thing is a disaster...

"Big lie" strikes again.

From one of your old "associates" like me?

Now, just so I can be informed --

That's why I'm here, to "inform" you...

Now, just so I can be informed -- what angle through the atmosphere does a ground base lasar need to shoot down a missile, before warhead separation? How close does the lasar have to be to target?..

Or that something like a "lasar" could solve the problem...

How big an airplane does it take to house a chemical lasar that might shoot an airplane down at 10 miles? How many shots/sec (or per hour) does that lasar have?..

" The milestone was the first "light test" of the Track Illuminator Laser at a facility El Segundo, Calif. The TILL, one of four critical lasers in the ABL, was the first to demonstrate that it can project powerful pulses of light on a small section of a missile and obtain data of the target's speed, elevation and probable point of impact.

Note how very early in the control logic, and also ask exactly what the errors of x, y, z axis velocity and position are using most optimistic theoretical assumptions, for this lasar, on the geometry of targets in question...

In any case, for lasar pulse times, atmospheric cooling isn't significant.

I haven't seen the reports either, and I asked Dirac for them previously.

The energy requirements to shoot down a jet with a lasar are large, and if they've got that working, I'm most impressed -- I'm not saying it isn't done, quite -- but it is surely a most impressive feat -- quite a bargain for 60 billion dollars and twenty years.

Even so, the feat, even if it is true (and usually rumors about classified equipment are disinformation) 99 that's a long way from shooting down a missile ( for example, you have to know where the missile is -- and they don't have the resolution to do that comfortably for even ONE incoming -- much less a few, with a number of decoys )

And if that lasar is big enough to shoot down a plane --

how big is it?..

It is not certain if Tesla ever used the death ray, or indeed if he even succeeded in building one. But the following is the often-related story of what happened one night in 1908 when Tesla tested the foreboding weapon.

At the time, Robert Peary was making his second attempt to reach the North Pole...