nytimes.com — The U.S. government is seeking to develop a powerful ground-based laser weapon that would use beams of concentrated light to destroy enemy satellites in orbit. The largely secret project is part of a wide-ranging effort to develop space both defensive and offensive. The White House has recently sought to play down the issue of space arms.
Sep 29, 2006 View in Crawl 4
laneSep 29, 2006
i would love to see the face of some kid as he flies his kite into the lasers range and watches it be cut in half and burn all the way down while simply thinking WTF?!
fricken4Sep 29, 2006
Space weapons are pretty useless when Americas enemies are pretty much all geurilla/terrorist fighters. The Star Wars program is just an excuse to funnel untold trillion into the military industrial complex.
mrkiteSep 29, 2006
Wouldn't it be great if all weapons were banned from the world, and we were back to when you had to deal with people hand-to-hand?
burritovisionSep 29, 2006
I oppose armed conflict.
donpmitchellSep 29, 2006
The Russians did this more than 20 years ago. There was a old rumor at Caltech/JPL that the Russians disabled Seasat with lasers, because seasat data was being processed to extract Soviet submarine wakes. Who knows if that's true, but the Russians pretty much invented all this funky phase-conjugate optics and exotic laser technology. Typical example: <a class="user" href="http://adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2003SPIE.5137..165S">http://adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2003SPIE.5137..165S</a>