Boeing [BA], industry teammates and the Missile Defense Agency yesterday announced achieving a major milestone in Airborne Laser (ABL) development, firing a high-energy chemical laser onboard the ABL aircraft for the first time during ground testing on Sept. 7 at Edwards AFB, Calif.
ABL is part of MDA’s developing ballistic missile defense system that will provide speed-of-light capability to destroy all classes of ballistic missiles in their boost phase of flight.
Northrop Grumman [NOC], under contract to ABL prime contractor Boeing, designed and built the megawatt-class laser, the most powerful directed energy weapon ever developed for airborne use.
“The achievement of ‘first light’ onboard the Airborne Laser aircraft is a key milestone for the ABL team,” Scott Fancher, vice president and general manager of Boeing Missile Defense Systems, said in a statement. “The team did an extraordinary job preparing ABL for this important test. The program remains on track to reach the missile shoot-down demonstration planned for 2009.”
“The start of laser firings marks the completion of a 10-month effort to install and integrate the high-energy laser and prepare it for testing,” Mike Rinn, vice president and program director of ABL, said. “Using Lean process improvements, a joint contractor team reduced laser installation time on the aircraft to about a third of the time required when the laser was installed in the system integration laboratory at Edwards.”
ABL’s high-energy laser will undergo a series of additional ground tests, building toward lethal levels of duration and power. The laser first will be fired into an onboard calorimeter, which captures the beam and measures its power. The laser beam then will be sent through the beam control/fire control system, exiting the aircraft through the nose- mounted turret. To prepare for the tests, modifications to the ABL hangar at Edwards were completed, and additional integration testing of the beam control/fire control system was completed.
Ground firings of the laser will be followed by flight tests of the entire ABL weapon system, culminating in an airborne intercept test against a ballistic missile in 2009.