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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."
What do you mean, does it work? Of course it's working, you don't see any tigers do you?
Gentlemen (and ladies), unpack your Atari 2600's.
Protect those cities!
liqbase
I see "laser" and I see "bubble." Clearly, this plan involves some frickin sharks at some point.
Bill Clinton: Pimp we can believe in. - The Shirt!!!
By which I mean actual, migrating waterfowl. They'll fall out of the sky right into the Orange Terminal's food vending area, where Duck a la Orange will still sell for $50, right next to the $50 sandwiches. This is convenient, because that's what it will take to finance the laser equipment.
Luckily, Reagan National, in DC, can just use shark-mounted lasers swimming in the Potomac River.
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
...and I propose they do this via some sort of dedicated network that controls them all, say, Skynet?
I don't think that we should trust a protective shield with a metric radius in the U.S.
Number of US airports (http://www.cia.gov/cia/publications/factbook/fiel ds/2053.html): 14,893m ): At least 72
Major US airports (http://www.fly.faa.gov/flyfaa/usmap.jsp): Approx. 40
US airports with international flights (http://aerospace.web.mtsu.edu/usinternational.ht
Minimum likely cost using low-ball $25 million per airport figure and only major airports: US$1 billion
Mid-range likely cost using higher $30 million per airport figure, and all international airports in the US: US$2.16 billion
Realistic projection, expecting a 50% cost overrun, and ~100 airports: US$4.5 billion
Potential maximum even if cost per airport is reduced to 1/10th the lowest projection, and only 1 in 4 US airports is protected: US$9.3 billion.
All this just to stop something that's never happened on US soil, and AFAIK never successfully happened elsewhere (terrorists using a missile to shoot down a commercial passenger aircraft). Who said terrorism was bad? It sure as heck is good business if you're Northrop...
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.
The main reason behind deploying the shields at airports is, to prevent terrorists from using hand-held rocket launchers. These rocket launchers can be used to destroy planes that are at a low altitude. Low altitude planes are easily sighted around airports when they are about to land or take-off. Hence domestic airports are a big market for these systems.
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.
Rocks don't do that. Their failure mode is to lie there and gather moss.
"I've got more toys than Teruhisa Kitahara."
Low altitude planes are easily sighted around airports when they are about to land or take-off.
Having worked at an airport, I can say first hand that low altitude planes are very rarely about to take off.
https://www.eff.org/https-everywhere
You, my friend, have been watching too many Prime-Time news specials.
.50 cal has a 10 round clip. That means you have 2 rounds per engine, plus two rounds. The recoil on that rifle
.50 cal, not even a .223 (the effective range of which is _way_ less than 2000 meters). Think about it: if you could shoot stuff down with .223, why even issue MANPADs? Your average Jihadi would just use his trusty AK-47-like weapon.
It is NOT easy to hit an aircraft with a rifle. This is why anti-aircraft guns are
machine guns or cannon. On approach, a 747 is traveling quite fast (around 170 knots, or 314 kph). It has four engines.
A Barrett
is PROFOUND. You probably couldn't shoot down a CRJ-6000 effectively with one of these, let alone an
inbound heavy.
Also, Since the effective range of a B.50 is 2000 meters (2 km), you would have about 22 seconds to make all eight shots in the best conditions. That may seem like a lot, but it's not. Especially considering your target is moving erratically (turbulence), is far away
(you have to begin shooting at the edge of the range of your weapon), and people are going to notice this firearm being discharged.
And this is with a
Why be afraid? The world is dangerous, but fear of someone shooting down a jet with a pop-gun doesn't help anybody.
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.
There is no technology that is going to protect against all threats. THEL removes certain opportunities, forcing would-be terrorists to deal with a smaller attack profile. Just because the THEL concept doesn't work on all threats doesn't mean that it's an invalid concept.
Consider network security. We use firewalls to deal with certain connectivity threats. We use IDS/IPS to deal with certain threats that go through connectivity that must remain open. We use antivirus to deal with certain e-mail and file-based threats. We use logs to look for deviations from accepted activity within systems. None of those on its own will deal with all of those threats on its own.
Consider the threats faced out in the world. Whatever you think of the background reasons, Katyushas, RPGs, mortars, and even artillery shells are real risks to soldiers on the ground as well as to civilians near threat zones (think Israel, Iraq, and maybe Turkey). The ability to knock these down in flight, at least in the small quantities used by guerillas, saves lives and property. And to clarify for those that may not know, the Qassim and Katyusha rockets are not cruise missiles. They're simple rockets that can be constructed with the tools found in a basic machine shop. While THEL can knock down cruise missiles, that's not what they're intended for here.
Your mention of cars, light aircraft, and ships are another threat entirely, and much harder to deal with. Stolen ships are a less-likely vector, because a stolen ship is a lot harder to hide, especially when you're trying to get into port. It's more likely that it will be legitimately purchased by a shell company and then sailed under legal registration. In any case, THEL is not intended to deal with those threats. Those have to be dealt with largely by eyes. As a would-be pilot and an occasional commercial flier, I have the most concern with the light aircraft and the car bomb at the loading zones. I have no desire to deal with a plethora of additional FAA regulations to deal with just to rent a Cessna or a Piper, nor do I want to have to take a shuttle two miles from another drop-off point (which just moves the target) to the drop-off point.
You can never go home again... but I guess you can shop there.
On a more serious note, if you are shooting a laser at a device that contains explosives within it, you need much less power to detonate it (or at least seriously damage its detonation mechanism) than to shoot down an airliner. SAM missiles are not built like tanks, especially the shoulder-fired variety, so the idea, in principle, does not sound that dangerous to me.
Nevertheless, the idea another slashdotter has posted about putting countermeasures on the airplanes, sounds much cheaper and safe than the laser thing. As far as I know, the Israelis are already using this in El Al planes, and I heard stories about them actually having to use this (and being successful).
www.meneguzzi.eu/felipe
Well, this kind of new defensive weapon is always rolled out in several phases.
First phase is characterized by an upsurge in Northrup's market cap. That's just begun. All Aboard!
Second phase is characterized by initial installations and mild cost overruns (not to exceed 250% of estimated costs). Given the current Administration in Washington, that is almost certainly going to start before Nov 2008.
The next phase will see something "unexpected" happen, that will have the nickname "laser chaff" (possibly other nicknames, depending on how the decoys are actually implemented by the nasty, clever blackhats). Somebody's gonna die.
Then Northrup's market cap will drop again.
The trick to mastering this new technology is appropriate monitoring of potential terrorists' phone calls and email so you can know when to tell your cronies that it is time to trim their portfolios of Northrup stock.
The whole thing does point out the critical need for improving and expanding Homeland Security's capabilities for monitoring email, phone conversations, and the like. When it comes to protecting stock market portfolios of the rich and famous, we can't be too careful.