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."

Terrorists?

[chis101]

I hadn't heard anything about airports being threatened by ballistic missiles...

Is this a genuine threat, or just some company thought "Hey, I bet I can get them to buy this!"

Re:Missile Command!

[nickheart]

This seems to be the closest that any of the current posts have gotten to the actual product that is being sold.

Yes it seems funny to have a real-life space invaders defence, but it's not the worst idea in the world.

We know that light is faster than any other Surface to air defence we currnetly employ, but also that it follow a (reletively) straight line.

i think that with enought testing and debugging, you should be albe to knock a missle out of the air even when it's raining/snowing - in reply to a different post.

Re:useless against low-tech threats

[m874t232]

Think about it: if you could shoot stuff down with .223, why even issue MANPADs?

For defense, you need to be able to shoot planes down reliably. For terror, even a rare hit would be sufficient.

you would have about 22 seconds to make all eight shots in the best conditions

Why would a terrorist need more than a single hit? It seems to me that there are lots of vital structures on an airplane that, when hit by a single bullet, could cause serious problems.

Why be afraid? The world is dangerous, but fear of someone shooting down a jet with a pop-gun doesn't help anybody.

Neither do illusions that an overpriced ray-gun is going to make air traffic safer.

Re:A license to print money...

[Aaron England]

I sympathize with your skepticism of this project's value. But I disagree with attitude of discounting the threat. For starters there have been several instinces throughout history where terrorists have used missiles to shoot down passenger aircraft. But more to the point, if insurgents in Iraq and Afghanistan can use RPGs or MANPADs to bring down military aircraft, I think it's safe to say the same tools are just as a capable of bringing down a commercial. In fact, given that commercial airlines are relatively unmanueverable as well as the fact that they don't carry any countermeasures, you have to assume increased plausability.

Re:useless against low-tech threats

[DarkAxi0m]

just a question, But how close do you think one would have to be to break the skin on a aircraft? You say the effective range on the Barrett is 2km, but is that enough to break what ever metal is used on the skin of a plane or just something like human skin? This seems like something that aircraft designers would look at, not just bullets but other 'things' that could hit an aircraft. Or am i to belive movies that anything bigger than you average bird would bring down the plane in a huge-spectacular-surround-sound-slow-motion-moving -fireball?

Not for ballistic missiles

[A nonymous Coward]

I admit to being a typical non-RTFA slashdotter, but the sumamry quote that this is meant to be a bubble, and some knowledge of current affairs, makes it pretty unlikely that ballistic missiles are the expected intruding weapon of choice. Those are long distance inaccurate area weapons (SCUD) or nuclear war weapons, and then you have other problems. This is meant for, as the sumamry says, mortar shells, artillery, and manpads with a very short range targeted against planes as they are landing and taking off. Manpad defense is best done by confusing the seeker, but you still have the problem of a confused missile coming down who knows where. Mortar and artillery shells have thicker skins and probably would require burn thru and the concomittant high accuracy and long dwell time, and that sounds problematical to me. Since their target is planes on the ground, terminal buildings, etc, there isn't much point to confusing their aim, which is impossible for such ballistic weapons, and exploding them in the air is only better in that the shrapnel will fall down slower. Maybe they have some idea of being able to disable the exploder entirely, but I how?

I wonder if this is just a fairy tale along the lines of the Alaska ballistic missile defense system, whose purpose seem to be propping up the starving defense industry and making it look like the Current Occupant is doing something.

Re:Not for ballistic missiles

[megaditto]

[...]purpose seem to be propping up the starving defense industry

You say it like 'donating' to weapons development is a bad thing for the US. But when shit hits the fan, America will still have its weapon pipeline even while everything else is outsourced to China...

[...]makes it pretty unlikely that ballistic missiles are the expected intruding weapon of choice.

They aren't. I was merely pointing out why Reagan-style missile defences is hard to build.

Overall, deploying rocket interceptors (like in Patriot) or radar-steered Gatling cannons (like in Phalanx CIWS) is a much better idea, but definitely nowhere as profitable for the supplier.

Re:A license to print money...

[_Sharp'r_]

putting up guard rails around roads with drop-offs that don't have them we would save thousands more lives

Spent that way, you'd likely cause more severe injuries and cost more lives. At least the laser system is less likely to actually cause as much additional harm.

From wikipeda [wikipedia.org]:

It is important to note that guardrail had frequently ranked as among the highest sources of injury and fatality in a fixed-object crash (1). Among the primary reasons for this is the type of treatment used at the leading end of the guardrail, which faces the oncoming traffic. Most end treatment designs will either deflect, absorb, or launch the vehicle. Deflection causes the vehicle to be redirected back into traffic -- particularly dangerous on undivided roadways, for the vehicle may travel into oncoming traffic. Absorption is when the force of impact is directly transferred between the vehicle and guardrail, which may cause the end treatment to puncture the vehicle. Lastly, a vehicle can become airborne upon striking a guardrail's end treatment, which may negate the purpose of the guardrail should the vehicle continue beyond the guardrail and conflict with the danger that the guardrail was intended to protect. Additionally, an airborne vehicle is more likely to collide in a manner that the vehicle was not designed to handle, increasing the risk of failure in the vehicle's collision safety systems.

Due to these risks, transportation engineers are increasingly limiting the use of guardrail as much as possible, for guardrail should only be placed when the roadside conditions pose a greater threat than the guardrail itself. In addition to new research into end treatments, public awareness among both drivers and engineers has been gradually reducing injuries and fatalities due to guardrail.

Contrary to some common belief systems, when the government decides to spend lots of money on some big project to "keep people safe" (or some other similar noble sounding purpose, like "eliminating poverty"), like your $9 Billion on guard rails, usually what they actually accomplish is to make the problem worse.

Re:I have this rock that keeps tigers away.

[PHPfanboy]

Nice troll. It might be interesting if it were true.

Truth is Northrop Grumman is trying to sell the Israeli government a (jointly to-be-developed) laser system to protect against short range missiles. Calculations are that it's a waste of money, so it looks like an R&D manager is trying to save his project with a new "killer app" (pun intended).

Re:useless against low-tech threats

[dario_moreno]

a few dozen planes and helicopters were shot down in Vietnam by AK 47s. The NVA even trained specialists for that purpose. I personnaly met an old man who had received a special medal for one of these feats.

Re:Failure modes

[Meneguzzi]

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).

Re:MANPADs

[DrXym]

The problem here that I see is that planes have to get low to land. No laser is likely to be reliable enough to take out a missile which has about 2 seconds to travel from the ground to its target. I think it more likely that any automated laser defence system is likely to get severely confused by itself and start blasting at birds, fireworks or even aircraft. Given that, I think I'd prefer an airport which didn't use such a system.

Besides which, I'm sure a .50 caliber machine gun or even a automatic rifle could do enough damage to a jet as it passes overhead, that it stands a good chance of crashing before it can turn around and land. It only has to happen once to make a mockery of any defence system.

Re:Interesting, but...

[Mr Pippin]

Absolutely, seems like most expensive defense systems, they are either limited in scope, or countermeasures are comparatively cheap to implement.

For instance, if it can only actively track and destroy one target at time, then fire two missiles concurrently.

Get a bunch of birds, paint their undersides with radar reflective coating, and let them loose near the system. Might be more fun that feeding alka seltzer to seagulls.

Re:headless chicken

[Anonymous Coward]

We could lose a commercial airliner to a missile every month and flying would still be safer than driving a car.

Sadly that's only the case if you measure by number of passenger miles travelled. If you measure by any other metric - number of vehicle departures, number of passenger departures, number of passenger hours travelled - commercial airliners are already far more dangerous than cars.

Re:Failure modes

[trentblase]

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.

Explosives, you say... you mean like jet fuel? It's not just for breakfast anymore.