Not a great sign for one of the Navy’s new shipborne laser efforts: its first test out at sea was interrupted by an unspecified glitch, leading the Navy to halt the exercise. But the sea service insists the Maritime Laser Demonstration program didn’t actually fail.
Rear Admiral Nevin Carr, the chief of naval research, confirmed to Inside the Navy’s Andrew Burt that “an internal component” of the laser cannon “required replacement” during a test on an unspecified ship some weeks ago. While the test was stopped midway through, Carr told Burt, “there was no test failure.” A Navy program manager on the program agreed that it was premature to rule the test a failure, but made the problem sound more severe: “Yes, we had some things that broke.” Still, it’s just one early test.
The Maritime Laser Demonstration is a Navy research partnership with Northrop Grumman, who received $98 million to develop laser weapons by 2014. If they work, they’ll be capable of creating a one-kilometer “protective shield” of directed-energy blasts around ships, eventually expanding to several kilometers in subsequent versions. The overall idea is to blast away “small vessel threats in hostile maritime environments” — think pirate ships in the Gulf of Aden, or the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps Navy’s “swarming” tactics.
It’s hardly the only laser gun intended for use in the Navy’s upcoming arsenal. The same Office of Naval Research that’s funding the Maritime Laser Demonstration is years into a $163 million program to turn a multi-wavelength Free Electron Laser into a gun, a sensor and a targeting system. That’s still years off, so right now it’s hunting for cosmic energy sources.
And it’s just a matter of time before testing on the Maritime Laser resumes out at sea. In October, Northrop Grumman told The Register that the laser cannon had “burned through small boat sections” on land tests out at the Potomac River Test Range with “100 kilowatts and beyond” worth of energy.
Getting lasers to work at sea is no easy task. Condensation and other particles in the sea air can act as obstructive elements to a laser beam, causing it to lose potency. But a Northrop exec told Burt, “The goal really is to demonstrate the readiness of lasers to transition for operational use, and we’ve just made tremendous progress.”