Pentagon wants to test space based particle beam weapon in 2023

Defense officials want to test a neutral particle-beam in orbit in fiscal 2023 as part of a ramped-up effort to explore various types of space-based weaponry. They’ve asked for $304 million in the 2020 budget to develop such beams, more powerful lasers, and other new tech for next-generation missile defense. Such weapons are needed, they say, to counter new missiles from China, Russia, North Korea and Iran. But just figuring out what might work is a difficult technical challenge.

So the Pentagon is undertaking two studies. The first is a $15 million exploration of whether satellites outfitted with lasers might be able to disable enemy missiles coming off the launch pad. Defense officials have said previously that these lasers would need to be in the megawatt class. They expect to finish the study within six months.

They’re also pouring money into a study of space-based neutral particle beams, a different form of directed energy that disrupts missiles with streams of subatomic particles traveling close to light speed — as opposed to lasers, whose photons travel at light speed.

On Wednesday, officials speaking to reporters at the Pentagon voiced guarded confidence that they would result in something that would in fact be deployable.

It’s not the first time that the Department has looked at such weapons. In 1989, the U.S. launched a neutral particle beam into space, as part of an experiment called BEAR, for Beam Accelerator Aboard a Rocket.

The experiment report ldescribed it as modestly successful: “The BEAR flight has demonstrated that accelerator technology can be adapted to a space environment. This first operation of an [neutral particle beam] accelerator in space uncovered no unexpected physics.”

But there’s a big difference between a successful experiment and an affordably deployable weapon. As part of the earlier effort, several companies produced prototype designs. The weapons they sketched were enormous. One was 72 feet long.

On Wednesday, Defense officials said that advances in technology have brought down the potential size and cost of space-based particle beams.

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Fascinating.......

A NEUTRAL particle-beam weapon? A neutron cannon? Straight outa-Babylon 5 yo!

Seriously, a collimated neutral particle beam has huge advantages, in vacuum the particles in the beam won't repel each other causing dispersal over distance, you can't tune defensive measures to frequency like you can with a known laser, much better penetration than lasers which can be stymied by their own effects on the target.

We were going to use grazing mirrors with nuclear bomb pumped X-ray lasers back in the Star Wars program, but that was largely theoretical. That's high-ish energy photons. But neutral particle beams? But how the fuck do you efficiently generate and collimate a neutral particle beam? You cannot steer neutral particles like we can charged particles in accelerators (which is good, avoids beam deflection in space), nor is there a stimulated emission, amplification, and reflection/optics that created the collimated beams in lasers.

IF you read the research out there on collimated neutron particle beams for research purposes, the don't collimate the beam in efficient ways. They simply absorb anything with an off axis trajectory... hugely inefficient, which is fine if you have a big ass nuclear reactor for a neutron source and only need a small output beam for neutron radiography research, not good if you need a high power high efficiency low weight system that you can launch to break other people's shit.

so paging @MrHiggs and @L_JE

Contrasted to charged particle beams, neutral particle beams have several inherent properties that make them very attractive for space based applications. In particular, high energy neutral particles propagate in straight lines unaffected by the earth's magnetic field and have a very brief flight time to targets even at extended ranges. In addition, the neutral particles become high energy charged particles upon interaction with the surface of a target and penetrate deeply into the vehicle, thus making shielding relatively ineffective. In the case of a nuclear warhead, these particles are capable of heating the nuclear material by fission processes, neutron generation and ionization. For non-nuclear material, heating is produced by ionization, possibly producing kill by thermal initation of the weapon's high explosive.

ost

Cool now when the lizard aliens attack we can fight back

How much ablative cover on roof of house for space based particle beam?

BRB.

Ablatives work well with lasers, not neutral particle radiation.

For neutrons, borated PE works, or maybe just put a swimming pool on your roof?

Just long enough for China to steal the technology.

Pump it up to gigawhat power!!!

Seems like this would only be effective for ballistic missiles which leave the atmosphere.  For targets on the surface or on a low trajectory (like short-range missiles or planes), the beam would interact with the atmosphere before it got to the target.

Interesting stuff...

Atmosphere would attenuate and disperse a neutral particle beam through interactions with the air.

An efficient orbital beam weapon system built with sufficient hardness and with a high firing rate would provide a cheap and hard-to-counter, hard to decoy, thus highly reliable exo-atmospheric interception against ballistic threats. You could even intercept before decoys/RVs separate from the bus.

That breaks the "interceptors are more expensive than countermeasures" problem of ground based missile defense.

It forces the enemy to use traditional or hypersonic cruise missiles for deterrence instead of BMs, or have a ground based ASAT laser than can fry your orbital defenses before they can intercept RVs.

It also could force an enemy to consider a first strike before your orbital beam system is capable of neutering their deterrent capability, leaving them totally vulnerable to a first strike.

Of course, building an orbiting particle beam weapon is a gross violation of the Outer Space Treaty of 1967.

Makes me wonder how effective such a system would be against ASAT missiles.

This thing,  is called an RFQ accelerator, (RadioFrequency Quadrapole, which is a special antenna that accelerates charged particles at Mega-volt/meter gradients).  This one was supposed to do ... who knows what. Test bed?  Target/Decoy discrimination via neutron adsorption gamma spectroscopy? fizzling physics packages in flight?  Scare the vodka out of Gorbachev?

who knows?  The cold war ended, SDI lost a lot of public funding and projects that didn't sink beneath the surface went hunting for a new purpose.

This little fella was repurposed to create radiotherapy drugs.  It didn't work out owing to the amount of shielding that would have been required at the hospital when it was turned on.

A true relic of the Reagan Era.   Built with 80s-era machining tech, this RFQ is woefullly primitive, inadaquate and obsolete.  Modern accelerator tech is profoundly more powerful, efficient and compact.  (Look up PIP-II)

This is the real deal.

Here's the Ion Source.  The gas bottle on the right is full of 3He.   Very expensive.


Here's the accelerator, stuck inside of a very heavy steel tube that wouldn't have been needed in space.  The big black cables are the RF-drive for the RFQ.
There are three modules in this pic, 12 vanes.   10.5 mev beam power.

We created the neutron beam by running the 3He through a thin graphite foil that basically stripped off the extra neutron.

I can't talk about this specifically, only very general questions about accelerators.

I'll be standing by with popcorn though

That's the sort of thing I would hope they'd keep classified and never reveal exists until they actually use it...

LowBeta, I'm now sure more than ever that we know many of the same people.

Or make the enemy wonder if you already have it. . .

No telling what we already have.................I wouldn't be shocked to see some sort of mass driver/rail gun type weapon in space some day

Or NOT see it. . .

That would be incredibly inefficient no? In terms of the heat energy the weapon would create vs the energy it would impart... like 10-100x the beam energy? Radiating heat is a big problem with space weapons.

It is indeed very inefficient, but in practice that's not as big of a problem as you'd think. Particles come through the stripper with most of their energy, just broken apart, with the neutrons freed from the helium.   The stripper doesn't absorb all of that beam power. It's more like a screen being sprayed with a hose.

With neutrons, the number of neutrons on (in) target tends to be more important than their energy.   In fact, if the energy is too high, they'll just drill through or bounce off into space.   A common example of this is the use of water as a moderator in nuclear reactors, which is used to lower the neutron energy to something that can "couple" to the other uranium atoms fuel. Neutrons that can couple get absorbed into a nucleus.

Very loosely,  protons act like bullets.  Neutrons are more like ebola.

eta: oh crap.  Mr. Higgs is watching.

It's about time...

Mechwarrior, here we come!

Cool ??

It's time to bring the MAC guns online

Made me think of this...

Did you notice ‘next gen’ defenses?  The space force has existed for a while.

You two know way more about this than I think is legal.

The idea of using these in orbit to kill warheads makes a ton of sense.

The part about engaging stuff on the launch pad from space? That's awesome

People can know whatever. If people who can independently research don’t get recruited it’s not the individuals fault.

Neva been dun befo

Step 1: Space weapons
Step 2: Russia blows up space weapon
Step 3: Kessler Syndrome
Step 4: Hollywood makes Gravity 2

We will have to come up with something that travels much faster than a missile or projectile to defend against an attack.

Was listening to Michio Kakus show the other night and he was saying it would take like thousands of satellites to accomplish have a beam weapon shield that will work.

My question is could we do it with less that have a longer range in a higher orbit?

Just thinking out loud.

I'll have to ask the British or New Zealand authorities about this.

Assuming they can make a beam weapon that is effective against ballistic missiles, I don't see why it would have a problem vs kinetic ASAT weapons.  The first nation that puts enough of these beam sats up will own space; other nations will only able to launch things into orbit if they allow it.

So then what is to stop a country from just developing land based weapons to shoot down the satellites?

I know nothing about this, genuinely asking.

Because, correct me if I am wrong, but I can generate substantially more powerful ground based weapons than any satellite and just zap them.

60 miles of atmosphere is a pretty good shield.

Works for the sun.

reminds me of my youth, when I wasn't sure what career path I was on.  I spend some time building drift chambers....the good old days of Argon-Ethane mixtures, large magnets, and superconductors

Boost phase is best phase for a kill. All the bad stuff stays all over your enemy's terrain.

Any attack made by the Rebels against this station would be a useless gesture, no matter what technical data they have obtained. This station is now the ultimate power in the universe. I suggest we use it.

That depends on if the weapon can shoot through the atmosphere.  Lasers might be able to, but I don't think particle beams can.  If we had a directed energy weapon that could kill a satellite from sea level, I think we would be throwing them on everything that floats or flies first before launching them into orbit.

There's an excellent documentary about how the 'Ace Tomato Company' fielded and tested just such a weapon. The target was a SS-50 source programable mobile Nuclear missile launched from the Pamir mountains of the Tajik Soviet Socialist Republic.

A-37B orbital gunship?

Is this how we get the GDI? I for one am not ready for the tiberian revolution.

Maybe the wall isnt needed. If this works just zap boarder jumps from space with a laser beam.

But seriously zapping a missle  from a launch pad could mean anything anywhere could be zapped.

Hell, they can't even figure out how acronyms work.