Star Wars

If this is the one I remember, the video is about 20 years old. In practice, the warhead, which you are seeing in the video, would be traveling at some significant fraction of 20,000 mph, launched either from a ground based interceptor, or from a satellite, which would be carrying multiple rockets. It would contain no explosives.



Congress at the time was controlled by the Dems, and Reagan was prez. Reagan promoted missile defense, and the Dems took the position that since it could never work, no money should be spent on it. Losing the presidency, however, sent the message that if they wanted to keep their seats, then some money must be spent.

The Dem approach was to vote R&D money on whatever they figured was least likely to actually work. In the aerospace biz, our mission was to prove them wrong in the least amount of time. Upon completion of a successful demonstration of the technology, the congress would declare the project to be an unnecessary provocation, de-fund it, and move to the next most unlikely item on the list.

In fairly short order, we had field demos ready for the Space Based Laser, Ground Based Laser, the Kinetic Kill Vehicle (from the video) AKA "Smart Rocks", and were making progress on "Brilliant Pebbles" and "Savant Sand".

Somewhere in my collection of memorabilia, I have a cartoon that illustrates about 12 or 18 of the more popular systems. On average, one of our systems was smarter than Tip O'Neill, speaker of the House, and prime enemy of Star Wars, as the press named it.

Most of the projects that were publicly discussed, were covered in Aviation Week and Space Technology magazine (our motto: If you can't keep it secret from us, you can't keep it secret from the Russians, either). One of the first projects to get R&D funding was the Space Based Laser, since a collection of physicists, who should have known better, had just published a lengthy article in Scientific American, essentially proving that it couldn't be built, couldn't be launched, and wouldn't work anyway. After all, it was to be a 5 meter diameter, 25 MW beast running on Hydrogen and Fluorine.

About 8 months after the money had been awarded, the contractor, Rockwell, I think, rolled out a 1 meter 5 MW proof of principle laser, and asked if a spot on the shuttle could be made available for a test in space.

The phrase "pants shitting hysteria" had not yet been invented, but it would have fit nicely, the reaction of the Dems. Funding was immediately cancelled, and the go-ahead was given to begin testing the Ground Based Laser, which was expected to hit a target on the other side of the world using 2 mirrors in orbit. The former Space Based Laser prototype was located at Sandia labs in New Mexico. The target was conveniently located in the Falklands Islands. Setup took 4 months, and the target was hit on the first try. More PSH, and funding cutoff, and the next item was funded, which I don't remember.

As I remember, it seemed to never take us more than a year to do the impossible and get our funding cut off. Fun times.

Our successes bothered the Russians, too, and they put an enormous amount of money into counteracting whatever we did, and eventually went broke and collapsed.

Star Wars; the best weapon system we never built.