Free TECHNOIR by John Lasker Page B

vehicle – the Generation 2 KV. Arms-control experts had convinced the Senate to kill it, apparently. The MDA claimed the Generation 2 KV would fly directly near the plume of a ballistic missile and track it. An incredible feat to say the least; but the kill vehicle, don’t forget, could have a dual use. It could also be used as a kinetic interceptor and destroy satellites.
    •          The Missile Defense Agency’s $1 billon-dollar Sea Based X-Band  Radar – built primarily by Boeing – is perhaps the strangest-looking ship to have ever cruised the Pacific. The alien-looking vessel is actually a revamped oil-drilling platform, and centered on its top is it’s most striking feature – a tremendous white globe that could engulf the middle of a soccer field. And from the top of this white cylinder to the water, is an intimidating void of roughly 20 floors. Hidden inside the inflated white ball is the clue to this ship’s ultimate mission: A radar dish so powerful it can decipher a real ballistic missile from a balloon that looks like a ballistic missile, claims the US military. The vessel is actually a new and important piece in the growing arsenal that is the US’s missile defense program. But it has a dual use, say space-weapons experts. It could also decipher space debris from any future “killer micro-satellite.” There are several other X-Bands across the globe; and if all are upgraded to maximum capacity, they could track over 300 targets at the same time, some less than a meter long.
    •            One former missile defense/space weapons program is the aptly named “ Rods from God .” The rods being kinetic energy weapons – oversized metal spears a foot wide and twenty- feet long – fired by a Battlesat and propelled by gravity as they hurtle towards their Earthly target. The system was planned to be comprised of two satellites. One would house targeting hardware, the other the rods. When they’re ripping through the atmosphere the rods will be traveling at a speed of 11,000 meters per second and with the apparent blast force of a nuclear tipped ICBM. But with no radioactive flakes falling out of the sky post-impact. Preliminary tests, conducted in the New Mexico desert, of rods dropped from a high altitude resulted in a penetration of over 50-feet of Earth. Bunkers beware.
    •            President Reagan envisioned laser cannons on satellites with the power to melt through the skin of ballistic missiles as they traveled through space heading towards their rendezvous with large US metropolises. Space-based laser cannons, however, never made it out of the 1980s. But the Missile Defense Agency is working on a handful of high-profiled laser projects, nonetheless (see Chapter 10). Such as the Airborne Laser (ABL) aircraft. The aircraft is a Boeing 747 that has been gutted and turned into a literal flying laser cannon. In 2008, the aircraft test fired its “primary beam,” a megawatt-class High Energy Laser (HEL), which is a weapons-grade laser, meaning it can take out missiles, artillery shells and mortars. In 2010, the primary beam actually
destroyed a ballistic missile during a test
over central California. The ABL has two other lasers on board, for tracking and targeting. The “laser cannon” that fires the weapons-grade laser is actually an exotic, circular mirror, 1.5 meters in length that can rotate nearly 360 degrees. It is underneath a roundish protective cone that covers the plane’s nose. The lens directs the laser as it leaves the plane. The “cannon” also consists of a long mirrored tube that extends to the back of the plane where the laser is generated. There are several different kinds of US military lasers, and some work better in space than others. The ABL’s laser works in both space and the atmosphere and technically is called the Chemical Oxygen Iodine Laser, or COIL. A laser created from a chemical reaction amongst chlorine, hydrogen peroxide