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Northrop to Sell Laser Shield Bubble for Airports
NeoPrime writes "CNN Money web site has a story about Northrop Grumman forecasting development of a laser shield 'bubble' for airports and other installations in the United States within 18 months. The system will be called Skyguard — a joint venture with Israel and the U.S. Army. It will have the capability to generate a shield five kilometers in radius."
The Palestinians need a laser shield a lot more than Israel does.
Unless this "shield" protects the airport from terrorists attempting to board a plane, what use are they? When was the last time a plane crashed into an airport building? Now if this was the White House or tother big military places, sure, but your standard domestic airport? Why?
I hadn't heard anything about airports being threatened by ballistic missiles...
Presumably, the more likely concern would be shoulder-fired SAMs shot at approaching/departing aircraft. A system that could actually acquire and zap such a thing from anywhere around the airport grounds would have to be highly automated and very fast... I'm a little concerned about false positives. A lot, actually.
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
The company I work does more airport approach clearance surveys than anyone else in the United States. I'm not sure how Northrop can claim they will be able to offer 20km protection against shoulder-fired missiles. I'm not sure how they could offer 2km protection.
While most airports have a great view of everything more than 20-30 feet in the air, many are in congested areas where there is no way they would be able to see an individual with a Stinger. Since shoulder-fired missiles seem to be the most plausible form of attack, I simply can't see how this system offers much protection at all to urban/suburban commercial airports.
I dub thee... Sir Phobos, Knight of Mars, Beater of Ass.
It may affect visibility, and if you're outside you might get wet.
I would like to see solid evidence that they are effective and that they eliminate a threat before the government pours billions into this technology.
"Scud Storm!" -- Jeremy of PurePwnage.com
Remember folks - it does not actually have to work when the criteria is to spend money on anti-terrorism devices to show that you care. It is just more silicon snake oil - what more can you expect in an environment where intelligence agencies are using voodoo such as polygraph tests and pretend they are a highly accurate way of telling the truth, reading minds or whatever is the fashionable delusion these days.
We need better science education to stop the people who control the public purse getting sucked in by confidence tricks.
You never know if the reporter got it right or if the publicist had an overactive imagination, but the big threat people are worried about is some dude hiding in the weeds and shooting one of those shoulder-launched heat-seeking missiles at an airliner trying to take off or land. There has been talk about equiping airliners with countermeasures against heat-seeking missiles.
The way the countermeasures are supposed to work is that most heat seekers are not full-fledged imaging devices but are instead rotating scan devices, and if you know the nature of the threat, you could pulse a heat source on and off to throw such a missile off target. I really think it is a stretch for a laser to stick in an airport control tower to actually shoot down a missile by zapping it with the laser. I think it would be a much safer thing, especially around a civilian airport, to spoof such a missle by pulsing it with IR to confuse the scanning seeker, or if that doesn't work, to blind an imaging sensor with a thermal pulse.
It kind of makes sense to provide a central, airport-based spoofer/blinder instead of having distributed spoofer/blinders on all of the aircraft. That avoids the old-aircraft retrofit problem, and the planes really only need this protection as they are landing and taking off -- those shoulder-launched missiles don't go very far. It would also make a lot of sense to provide protection against heat-seeking missiles because terrorists in theory could get a hold of them and they are small and portable to sneak around with. It would also make more sense that the laser system would be a spoofer/blinder kind of countermeasure rather than a Star Wars type of shoot-down ballistic missile defense.
Given what we have seen of insurgent guerilla tactics in Iraq, popping RPGs at departing flights would bring do wn a plane. Perhaps not everyone on board will get killed because of the low altitude, but terrorism is all about terrorizing a population. That laser shield isn't going to do much, is it? Moreover, the laser is pointless unless it is deployed at all airports because terrorists with a man-portable surface to air missile would certainly do enough research to figure out which airports do not have the defense system and act accordingly. Or they would just go to Japan and knock down a plane bound for the United States. This appears to be more comfort food for a worried nation's spirit.
A NYC lawyer blogs. http://www.chuangblog.com/
Is it 100% ready for full, zero defect deployment? Probably not. But then neither were aircraft, at first. Nor cars. Nor microwave ovens. Nor pretty much anything you can name.
Give it time. Some of these defense mechanisms WILL work. And work quite well.
And what happens when it is screwed with, causing it to shoot down planes instead of missiles?
The cure might be worse than the disease...
Flamebait, my ass.
I was wondering how the advancement of high energy laser beams powerful enough and accurate enough to destroy "rockets, mortars, artillery shells, unmanned aerial vehicles, short-range ballistic missiles, as well as cruise missiles" has managed to progress this far without anyone hearing about it. Also, if this technology actually works, why are any of the tests by North Korea bothering anybody near them. I mean, if you can shoot anything down with a laser, who gives a flip if they lob a small rocket or two towards you.
You have, of course, hit the mark with the Palestinian rocket issue. The entire west bank border is only 300km long. For less than $2B they could protect the entire border from rocket attacks. Which means that either (a) Israel doesn't care about bombings or (b) it doesn't work with shit. I'm betting on (b).
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
For example - the (normal) northbound departure from San Jose goes over about a jillion small industrial buildings and hard-to-inspect back alleys. A single person on one of the roofs under the departure route could badly damage departing aircraft with a rifle. A .223 or better would hole a wing (and fuel tank) with no trouble, and with good marksmanship, I doubt the Kevlar blade containment shields would stand up to a 50 cal round. No missile needed. No help from the can of laser whupass. Hell, the jihadi would probably even get away, although I understand that's supposed to be optional. How many billions are we going to spend on this? Do you feel safer? I didn't think so.
One simple adjustment to those respective policies would be something along the lines of "Don't invade other peoples' countries." Its kind of hard to wrap your head around, but I think we can do it.
They Are Night Zombies!! They Are Neighbors!! They Have Come Back from the Dead!! Ahhhh!
The Daily Show is shot in NY so he'd have to take 2 planes at least
Weaponizing civilian installations such as airports is a horrible idea. Sooner or later this system will accidentally shoot down a civilian aircraft. It's like weaponizing cars. You think there won't be mishaps? Increasing the number of ways an airplane can crash does not decrease the overall airplane accident rate.
Perhaps we should concentrate our efforts on finding people who want to commit homocidal acts and imprisoning them.
Or maybe stop international policies which cause people to want to commit homocidal acts against our airports.
While I'm at it...maybe we should stop trying to identify all the people that are not homocidal maniacs in a brain-dead attempt to find the homocidal maniacs by a process of elimination...
Does fear run your life?
1^2=1; (-1)^2=1; 1^2=(-1)^2; 1=-1; 1=0.
I don't have an exact figure, but there are roughly 500 airports with commercial flights into and out of them in the United States. Some of them only have a couple of scheduled flights a day. At, say, $25 million a pop, it will cost $12.5 billion dollars to equip all those airports with such a system, plus operating costs (presumably you have to have at least one guy babysitting the thing).
And you pretty much have to install these things everywhere an airliner flies. Terrorists aren't stupid (well, actually the evidence is that most of them are, but that's another story. Assuming they're stupid isn't a good idea IMO). They'll realise that if these systems exist, they should pick somewhere that's unlikely to be equipped with it. So while the planes at LAX and La Guardia land and take off with laser-guarded safety, our friendly local terrorists cruise on down to Bum's Rush, Iowa, and take potshots at the one RJ that lands there every day.
But assume these things *do* get installed in every airport in the country. What do our terrorists do? They scrap plan A - missiles at airplane takeoff - and go to the equally lethal plan B, a couple of tonnes of explosives under the grandstand at the local high school football game. Or any one of plans C through ZZ. So we've blown 10 billion dollars to achieve very, very little.
This is almost a quintessential example of protecting against a movie plot threat.
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a rigged demo
--Andy Finkel (J. Klass?)
Don't worry about it. If decades of Star Wars have taught us anything it is that (1) you always run tests under artificially optimal conditions, and (2) it doesn't actually have to work to get more contracts.
another boondoggle like the explosives sniffers with a 40% false positive rating that can't tell chocolate from plastic explosives -- and cost over $10 million per machine. Yes, every airport needs one of those!
how about taking the $150 million for this toy and use it to actually improve airport security? could hire a personal valet for every passenger for that price.
As to why rockets keep landing on Israel, well, consider how many people have been killed by all those unguided Kassam rockets. According to Wikipedia, thirteen people have been killed by Palestinian rocketeers after hundreds of tries. That's far less than one suicide bomber can do in a pizza joint. In the great scheme of things they're more of an annoyance than a danger - they're a psychological weapon. There's probably a hundred ways Israel can spend two billion dollars that will save more than thirteen lives over four years.
This is a tired argument, and that is a tired rationale. Iraqi=Afgani=Taliban=North African=Arab=evil, right?
They Are Night Zombies!! They Are Neighbors!! They Have Come Back from the Dead!! Ahhhh!
To be sure, the detection part is least of this system's problems.
The real difficulty is keeping the beam perfectly focused on a moving target (need to re-adjust the focus, keep on precisely the same spot), probably flying during a heavy fog/rain (cannot use IR there).
Why does the beam need to be focused? Because the target energy density would need to be at least on the order of 30 GigaWatt/m^2 (and much more if you are dealing with hardened stuff: e.g. a Russian SS-18).
The work on Ballistic Missile shield lasers involved building a megawatt-range IR deuterium fluoride laser for the cost of about $1,000,000,000. While N-G's local shields would deal with softer targets at closer range, still, expect the cost of a 100kW laser alone to be on the order of 10-100 million. Steep price to pay per airfield, given that one cannot use the darn thing during fog/rain.
Obama likes poor people so much, he wants to make more of them.
If by "contribution to science" you mean "scam", then yes - this is a terrific contribution that taxpayers will have bought.
How long before one of these things mistakes a passenger jet for a rocket? Who's going to man the thing? I mean, Aegis Combat System is more or less the same thing and it shot down a passenger jet and there's relatively few Aegis systems. Imagine having these things at every major airport. I dunno, I don't think I'd be very comfortable flying with these things up and running.
I'm concerned about false negatives as well. Face it....this thing will NOT be perfect the first time out. IIRC, the Patriot system shot down a British Tornado, mistaking it for a hostile aircraft.
A false negative will be almost as bad as a false positive.
"It didn't detect that missile, the airliner got shot down, 300 people dead, $25B wasted....SHUT THE SYSTEM DOWN!"
Now we know why Bush likes to stand by and do nothing while N Korea, Iran and everyone else puts nukes on missiles. It's marketing for Northrup Grumman and the rest of the Star Wars missile defense snakeoil salesmen. When it doesn't work, it will be too late for anyone to ask for a refund.
--
make install -not war
Similarly, there are terror attacks (successful and foiled), against countries, whose foreign policies bully no one -- like Canada or India.
Huh? Canada, while not ever experiencing a terrorist attack in response to Canadian foreign policy, hasn't experienced a terrorist attack since 1985 (Air India 182), not including violence deemed terrorist in nature against Cuban, Turkish and Indian politicians on Canadian soil, which brings me to my second point. You might want to ask Pakistan, Sri Lanka, or any Sikh about that lack of bullying thing you're claiming for India.
-- Religion is not an exact science
So, make it hard for mortar shells and Katyushas and Qassims ... a Cessna in the landing pattern with a few hundred pounds of explosives won't be detected as dangerous until it is too close to be stopped. Ditto for cars coming to the curbside loading zones.
I have always marveled at the willingness of the military industrial complex to come up with expensive ways of guarding against rogue cruise missiles, which are expensive and unlikely compared to the simplicity of stealing a Cessna and cruising over the border like any other returning drug plane. Or pack your nuke into a stolen cargo ship, packed down in the hold under enough metal barrier cargo to keep its radiation hidden, and sail right into a harbor.
Osama bin Laden is notorious for doing things cheaply. I can't believe he has much interest in stealing cruise missiles when he could steal Cessnas or a cargo ship.
This recent North Korean volley of missiles made me wonder if anyone at the top actually was worried about it. I think rather they saw it as a wonderful opportunity to spend more money on useless weapons to make it look like they were defending liberty. Osama bin Laden and his ilk have nothing to retaliate against and nothing to lose. North Korea and Iran do. Their glorious leaders may be crazy, but they're not stupid. If they actually did land a warhead in the US, even just a few hundred pounds of dynamite, there would not be a single dissenting voice trying to talk the US out of pulverizing their countries. They know that, and we know they know that. Even their own citizens know that.
Infuriate left and right
Maybe a $10B price tag doesn't sound so bad after all?
Ya know how we caused the Soviet Union to collapse by forcing their military to spend, spend, spend?
$10B here and $10B there and pretty soon you're talking real money.
For a couple hundred thou the terrorists could drive America to complete, parnoiac economic ruin (not to mention social ruin) buying worthless "security."
I think that's why they call it "terrorism."
KFG
There's a chinese expression that literally translates to "spear and shield", meaning paradox. There was a weapon merchant selling spear and shield, claiming that his spear can cut thru any shield existed, and that his shield can protect against any spear existed.
Looks like Northrop Grunman is doing the same thing here, selling on one hand space laser gun that can destroy anything from outer space, and protective shield against laser gun on the other hand.
Someone is getting screwed somewhere.
If we spent the 9 billion putting up guard rails around roads with drop-offs that don't have them we would save thousands more lives.
--
WHO ATE MY BREAKFAST PANTS?
The stock market cannot "lose" anything. It is a zero sum game. Someone got the money, even if it is just the people who shorted or sold the day before.
The laser lightning rod
and the laser stun gun
One can defend runways and power plants from the much more likely event of lightning strikes. The other can give police a non-lethal recourse when dealing with ongoing street crime.
A frickin' laser defense system to stop missiles?
For what this costs we could have better-trained eyes on the ground and a lot more of them. Terrorism is composed almost entirely of the human element, technology is merely a means to an end. We can keep building gadgets to stop their gadgets and never see an end to the arms race, or we can better prepare our specialists to deal with the human element directly.
Women are like electronics: you don't know how damaged they are until you try to turn them on.
True, but does that mean you shouldn't try to defend against such threats?
You should only defend against threats if the defense makes sense in a cost/benefit analysis: how many lives to you expect to save for every million you spend.
Say that again after the first airliner is shot down by a MANPAD.
Demanding perfect safety is irrational. We could lose a commercial airliner to a missile every month and flying would still be safer than driving a car. People need to stop acting like headless chicken.
A deeper problem is that the tax payer is supposed to foot the bill for all of this: taxes already subsidize airports, fuel, airline bailouts, airport safety, and now airport missile defense systems? Where is it going to end? I say: leave it all to the free market. Airlines and airports can figure out the right tradeoff between safety, security, ticket prices, and passenger willingness to fly. If flying safely enough becomes too expensive, we should all just stop flying.
True, but... Since you don't have several hundred ballistic missiles being fired at each airport, every single day, which senario do you think is more likely, and more of a cause for concern?
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Firstly anti aircraft gun are not for commercial passenger flight, they are for military craft. Secondly, I live near an airport. I can assure you that at landing the craft is in a quite straigth line, your erratically "moving" is only happenning in strong wind condition, which is certainly NOT the norm at any airport I know (well maybe not denver :)). Especially if you are in the alignement of the landing/take off strip.
I have no idea how easy it is to fire a gun, and a better argument would be that you are not sure to target a vital part of the plane, but as other pointed out, you only need to hit SOMEWHERE to spread terror.
C. Sagan : A demon haunted world:
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visit randi.org
A billion dollar security shield to make us feel safe while terrorists take over planes with box cutters.
Brilliant.
"Which country did we invade to explain 9/11, USS Cole, etc?" Stop inventing the strawmen, and answer straight.
Assuming you accept U.S. government propaganda like the faked Bin Laden video tape, then the countries we invaded to provoke these attacks were Iraq and Saudi Arabia.
If you are a little less gullible, then you can figure out that it was a long pattern of U.S. foreign policy since the end of WW II. Just naming the highlights, we have the overthrow of the democratically elected Iranian government and the installation of the Shah; the slavish financial and military support for Israel and its genocidal campaigns against the Palestinians including the veto of over 200 U.N. resolutions against Israel; the support of various hated puppet regimes in the Middle East such as the Saudis; directly causing the deaths of 100,000's of Iraqi's after the first gulf war; the promised but withheld support of the Kurds and Shi'ites in their bid to overthrow Hussein after said war; etc.
I could go on, but, unless you have your head in the sand or other places, you get the point.
if it happens every 5 years, and maybe a thousand people lose their lives, your billions will save a thousand lives. But how many thousands die every year in road traffic accidents? or through preventable diseases? I know the UK (pop 60 million) loses 3000 a year to road accidents.
Im not saying you shouldnt do anything about terrorist attacks, but on a cost-benefit analysis basis, spending this much money on this system, rather than (for example) better healthcare, or road safety measures, is just inefficient.
I know WHY the govt would rather spend your money on a high profile l33t laser, but in logical terms, its an insane waste of money best used elsewhere.
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LOL, that's simply an absurd concept. Airports don't have anything to fear from the sorts of 'tactical' battlefield rockets that this would help against, and I'm extraordinarily doubtful that it would do jack *shit* against an RPG.
Oh, and regarding it's promising utility against shoulder-launched SAMs? Yes, I've seen the test films on laser-missile defense and, in a clear sky with no clutter, no ground interference, it can take out AAMs in a second or two...of course, if Terrorist Abdullah is going to fire a SAM-9, he's not going to wait until that 747 full of people is 2 miles away on a departing vector at 5000' giving the laser a nice multi-second chase solution. He's going to nail it when it's 1000 yards away, 150' in the air, loaded to the gills with fuel, engines on HOT, and the pilot has no altitude to cope with the consequences. This laser system going to detect, track, power up, and fire early enough to kill the warhead in that case? (Not to mention to track and compensate for, I dunno, that landing JAL 747 full of 300 Mall of America shoppers that's about to cross the beam during firing????) Um, no.
And can you imagine the maintenance contract on a ultra-high powered system with that sort of a hair-trigger, that has to basically sit "charged" 24/7? Egad. Yeah, I BET Northrop is hoping to sell a few of these.
-Styopa
Ya know how we caused the Soviet Union to collapse by forcing their military to spend, spend, spend?
This is only half true because you're missing the most important part of the equation: we outspent the Russians because we were in a better position economically to do so. Our strength is our Capitalism, which has collectively allowed the citizens of this country to build up wealth the likes of which cannot be found anywhere else on Earth. Even the poorest person in ths nation generally has a home, a car, cable TV, air conditioning, and a cell phone. Reagan knew the Russian strength was gross manpower, quantity over quality. If we tried to beat them using the same philosophy, we'd have lost. You never fight your enemy where he is strong, you fight him where he is weak. Case in point, we outspent the Russians and still won the Cold War. They spent less and went bankrupt. Q.E.D.
While it is true the current crop of Republicans is spending like a bunch of drunken sailors, it's important to keep perspective. We beat the Russians because our economic philosophy was so much more efficient than the Russian planned economy. What's so damned tragic is that after we beat them, we're now starting to resemble them more and more each day.
In the end they will lay their freedom at our feet and say to us, Make us your slaves, but feed us. - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
we outspent the Russians because we were in a better position economically to do so.
Well of course, but bear in mind that although we employed different strategies we were playing on the same field, by the same rules. The terrorists aren't.
What did they spend to bring down the WTC? What have we spent in response? Even a solid economy can be destroyed if you spend like a bunch of drunken sailors and we have transfered much of our economy from real wealth to paper "wealth" based on confidence, not "stuff."
There was this day in 1929 when the confidence went away. My grandparents were 20 years old on that day. My parents grew up in its aftermath (you can read a short description of conditions on my family's farm in the book Finding Dr. Schatz. Ask your library to buy a copy) and so, as a result, to an extent, did I. I have no illusions about the ultimate strength of our economy. In some ways we are stronger now than we were in the 20's, but in many ways we have made ourselves far, far weaker as well. Our strength is brittle and may thus be shattered.
I might also argue that it wasn't really the Soviet Union's economic philosophy that caused its collapse, but rather its social philosophy, which in response to the terrorist attacks we are daily moving closer and closer to adopting.
KFG
What would show the terrorists is refraining from terror and facing our future with our chins up as strong, free men, rather than as sniveling neurotics praying to Jesus to protect us while hiding in a self-imposed jail cell that the terrorists can still shoot us through the bars of.
I bite my thumb at them. They may shoot me while I do it, but they will have only my body, not my soul.
Freedom is not free. It has been paid for with the blood of patriots, but most of those patriots were not soldiers in the field, but rather just ordinary members of We the People steadfastly going about their daily lives in stubborn independence, bowing to and before no man, even though it cost them their lives.
Most particularly not to mere presidents and Rent-A-Cops.
That has always been the foundation of America's strength. The Soviet Union did not fall because it ran out of money. It fell because it's people had nothing left to stand for. America had no economy and no military to speak of when a group of "backwoodsmen" defeated one of the finest professional armies in the world at Beamis Heights (you call it Saratoga). The Afghans have no money and no military to speak of, yet it takes all we can do just to keep the "Mayor of Kabul" (you call him the President of Afghanistan) alive.
Simply because they will not captiulate to an outside force. Not the British, not the Russians and not the Americans.
Even though it cost them their lives.
America is selling its freedom for "security" that no amount of money can buy, because we now live under the delusion that it is the security of our bodies that is at issue, when it is our spirit that is at stake.
If we lose our spirit we shall fall.
I believe that's why they call it "terrorism."
KFG