Strategic Defence Initiative Star Wars

all of the footage in this video has been declared unclassified by the Department of Defense and the Strategic Defense Initiative organization the footage you are about to see all comes from the Pentagon's official files on SDI our purpose here is rather to concentrate on the technological challenges of SDI how the scientists and engineers are making Star Wars of reality today in this first video on SDI we will take a broader more system's view of the total Star Wars architecture and how each piece must fit into the system I'm still optimistic that a way will be found the door is open and the opportunity to begin eliminating the nuclear threat is within reach when first announced in 1984 many people said it couldn't be done the universal cry met by every new idea but a few dedicated men and women in and out of the Pentagon believed differently this is their continuing story before we begin we should warn you that this video contains more acronyms than you can count and a lot of jargon you may not understand acronyms are words formed by the first letters of a phrase like head I which stands for high endo atmospheric defense interceptor it speeds up communication but if you don't understand the meaning you're lost to make it easier and save us the time of explaining things we've included a complete printed glossary of SDI acronyms and terms with this video SDI is extraordinarily complex with literally dozens perhaps hundreds of programs we've divided the video into several major segments to help us understand and organize Star Wars first we'll look at the threat originally envisioned as protection from a massive Soviet attack today's threat comes from regional and theater weapons in third world nations as well in order to understand SDI we need to understand the architecture of how a missile attack work and what kind of windows of opportunity exist during the 25 to 30 minutes from liftoff to impact the character and vulnerability of an ICBM changes dramatically during flight as it goes from boost to mid-course deployment to terminal phase at that point we'll look at the history and background of SDI to put the whole program in perspective next we'll check out the overwhelming challenge of ATP in other words acquisition tracking and pointing whether you're looking up into space with the Sun as a background or down at the earth with all its infrared interference to find and track a target is very demanding then there's C cubed command control and communications with all the sophisticated jamming systems around how do you keep in touch here's a hint use a frequency that can't be reached from Earth after identifying the target we'll look at destroying the missile and it's warheads as we look at phase 1 we'll see how we went from smart rocks to brilliant pebbles and how to hit a bullet with a bullet in space the delivery systems are unbelievably complex but the warheads are kinetic they carry no explosives of any kind none and finally we'll take a look into the future at phase 2 this is the real Star Wars speed of light weapons neutral particle beams ground-based lasers with free electrons using fighting mirrors hypervelocity guns that accelerate to 10 kilometers per second at 100,000 G's remember everything you see in this video is real it's happening today all over the world from Lawrence Livermore Lab to Kwajalein Atoll from ground zero as the center of the Pentagon is called to Edwards Air Force Base the likelihood of a massive first strike from the Soviet Union is less today than in the past but that does not eliminate the threat to American troops and in wrists in the world today the greatest risk may come from the third world there are eight countries with missiles right now and most have or are developing nuclear weapons Afghanistan Iran Iraq Israel Saudi Arabia South Korea Syria and South Yemen have missiles in service with ranges up to 2,700 kilometers these other countries are testing or in development of missiles from North Korea's 300 kilometer Scud B to Iraq stammers one with a range of 2,000 klicks as you can see these missiles reach well into Europe the CIA estimates that by the year 2000 over 15 developing countries will be producing their own ballistic missiles and arming them with nuclear chemical and biological weapons the threat of massive US retaliation may not be a great deterrent to some of the off-the-wall third-world dictators the only protection is a defensive one you simply have to knock out the threat today the United States has no active defense against missile attack and finally there is always the chance of an accidental missile firing today it probably wouldn't lead to World War 3 but as the old joke goes a nuclear bomb can ruin your whole day to defeat a ballistic missile you have to understand how it works and how much time you have the lifespan of a ballistic missile is only thirty minutes in that time it gets up and out of the Earth's atmosphere and goes through three distinctive phases in the first phase which includes both boost and post boost the missile is leaving a white-hot plume and it's carrying all of its warheads in one platform or bus a single intercept can take out all warheads with one blow the problem is boost only lasts four minutes and post boost lasts only another 10 minutes only 14 minutes to detect the launch acquire the target track it and hit it at mid-course the bus which carries all the warheads releases up to a dozen live warheads and hundreds or even thousands of decoys the trick of course is to distinguish between decoys and the real rvs or re-entry vehicles SDI has 13 minutes during mid-course to sort all that out while most decoys are nothing more than mylar balloons in the vacuum of space they behave very much like RVs to make matters really interesting there's a good chance that all this will take place in a nuclear environment caused either as part of an enemy strategy or as the result of previous intercept the RV's begin their terminal phase when they begin to pass through the atmosphere in one way that makes things easier the atmosphere burns up and strips away all the decoys but there are only three minutes left to impact and the nuclear warheads are coming almost straight down at several thousand miles per hour put all together SDI has less than 30 minutes to detect the launch vehicle acquire the target track it discriminate the decoys point and fire as early as 1984 SDI performed a successful mid-course intercept hitting a bullet with a bullet in 1985 SDI demonstrated that a laser could destroy a ballistic missile booster case in 1986 as part of the Delta series Delta 180 intercepted a thrusting target in space as amazing as these feats were in many ways those were easy tasks the real challenge is creating a system not just a single technology a system that cannot be overwhelmed or defensed with a single trigger as with any research program many ideas were explored in the early days one possible solution would be the use of nuclear warheads which like horseshoes and hand-grenades only had to come close there was the idea of huge lasers planted in space that could hit boosters buses and warheads with the speed of light both ideas have fallen out of favor nuclear warheads might create more problems than they would solve by generating an environment so alive with infrared and other energies and frequencies that nothing could be seen by SDI sensors and seekers as for space-based lasers in order to get the power needed fully fala t a space-based laser would have to be so big that the cost of boosting it into space in quantity would be prohibitive plus having only a few such stations would make them vulnerable to enemy attack so over time SDI has become more streamlined and elegant the need to acquire travel analysis in all their stages all their phenomenology the Sun the earth and the Van Allen radiation bill has remained unchanged so has the need for massive radiation hardened nuclear hardened Jam proof computers and communication phase one however has come to focus on boost and post boost as well as mid-course defense in both cases we are looking at ke w's or kinetic energy weapons the King cavies or kinetic kill vehicles carrying no explosive warheads of any kind more on that later phase two focuses more on the mid course and terminal threat through the use of de w's or directed-energy weapons these are speed of light weapons involving such technologies as neutral particle beams free electron lasers and chemical lasers when you think of SDI the first thing that comes to mind is impacting enemy missiles and warheads in space with bombs or laser beams the biggest challenge to SDI may not be hitting a target it's finding it and tracking it ATP FC is acquired track and point that information is then converted to FC or fire-control the first line of information comes from bsts boost surveillance and tracking system bsts is a series of satellites looking down at the earth they are in geo stable orbit remaining over a single earth point 22,300 miles in space a boosting rocket creates a large white hot plume that is relatively easy to spot and track the tricky part comes in the handoff from the plume to the hard body of the missile itself the tracking is of the plume not the missile so any kinetic or directed-energy weapon must be targeted at the booster body not the plume a direct hit on the plume is worthless as an ICBM sheds its boosters and becomes a bus it loses most of its plume but is still hot and still carries all of its warheads once out of post boost SSTs or space-based surveillance and tracking coupled with ground-based radar take over and track right through the terminal attack phase to accomplish simply acquiring and tracking an ICBM with multiple warhead missiles demands four major components first you have to pick out all the missiles from all the space and Earth backgrounds of visible wavelength and infrared wavelength second you have to distinguish the missiles and especially the mid-course warheads from decoys and the over 5000 satellites and other pieces of space junk floating around up there third you need a computer system that is as fast as a supercomputer hardened against radiation and electromagnetic bursts and small enough to be boosted powered and cooled in space and finally you need a communication system that is Jam proof and secure or the whole program will fail one of the toughest target acquisition jobs is finding an object against the background of the Van Allen radiation belt or the aurora borealis over the North Pole if s T I could not find a target there you can bet that's where all the attacking missiles would come from as early as 1986 the earth LEM program was measuring all the phenomenology of the earth background including the aurora SDI has since proven it can find the target even there the 9-month Delta star flight conducted well over 100 operations measuring and mapping Earth and space backgrounds to be embedded in SDI sensor memory banks it also collected the effects of various chemicals released in space as possible countermeasures the Queen's match flight of 1988 collected infrared data on foreign targets as SDI continued to build its database in 1989 the Janus experiment used high-resolution infrared imagery to collect and catalog the signatures of post boost vehicles so future SDI sensors compare what they are observing to a database of known phenomenology and recognize what they are looking at distinguishing decoys can be tough but not impossible the first step is to discover the different signatures of warheads and decoys the Delta 180 series has been collecting information and helping build a database of vehicle and decoys signatures another way to distinguish warheads from decoys is interactively SDI is testing methods of hitting both decoys and warheads with broad beamed low-power lasers the heavier dense warheads will absorb the laser energy and become warm or marked while the laser energy will pass right through or destroy the decoy weapons guidance systems and seekers can then go only to the warmer marked targets SDI computing capability has grown and shrunk at the same time SDI needs supercomputer style capacity in space but can't spare the room weight or power while space-based computers don't need the memory they do need the speed comparing a BP flight computer with a Cray one we see the BP has 1/3 the MIPS for millions of instructions per second speed but it weighs three pounds compared to 10,000 and uses only 28 watts of power compared to 100,000 watts for the cray-1 SDI is working on diamond based computer chips compared to the current silicon based chips diamond chips can take operating temperatures of 500 degrees Celsius compared to 100 degrees Celsius failure temperatures for silicon chips this means that future SDI computers can be totally solid no need for space to cool chips even at the speed of light less distance to travel means faster processing space to space communications will probably be at 60 gigahertz this ultra high-frequency has two major advantages it is out of the range of nuclear effects which are frequency dependent 60 gigahertz is also less susceptible to earth-based jamming the 60 gigahertz signal and therefore any jamming signal is absorbed by the oxygen absorption line of the Earth's atmosphere it would never reach space but would be absorbed this space to space communication also points to another critical feature of STI independent operation of weapon systems if one part of the entire SDI system fails or is destroyed the others must proceed as instructed by themselves phase one weapons are all kinetic kill vehicles the two systems are brilliant pebbles and ground-based interceptors GBI focuses on mid-course or exo-atmospheric RVs and will be fired from karna spaces in 1987 the flag e or flexible lightweight agile guided experiment successfully intercepted a theater type missile reentry vehicle using a radar guided interceptor between the 1984 hitting a bullet with a non-nuclear bullet test in the 1987 Flag II test the problem became less hitting and destroying the target than finding and seeking the target eros or XO atmospheric reentry vehicle interceptor subsystem will test all the issues created by a mid-course intercept including optical seeker divert and axial propulsion all under stressing conditions one of the keys is to eliminate the effects of GTI's thrusting environment as it streaks up through the atmosphere seeking its mid-course target while other sensors in SSTs and GPR or ground-based radar may locate the target onboard sensors must function in order to allow any GBI to seek and destroy its target this is done primarily with infrared seekers initial validation tests will be conducted using a standard Minuteman 1 ICBM with a kkv mounted as the payload in its operational phase the GBI will be smaller than the second stage of a Minuteman the eros kinetic kill vehicle carries all its own systems including avionics divert propulsion infrared seeker and kill enhancement device to improve lethality the first full Eris test flights are scheduled for 1991 the heart of SDI phase 1 will undoubtedly be brilliant pebbles it is smaller and smarter hence the move from smart rocks to brilliant pebbles as a kinetic kill vehicle BP carries no warheads its mission is to find and destroy boost and post boost enemy vehicles simply by running into them like throwing a rock at a bottle at the incredible closing speeds of a BP vehicle and a boosting rocket over 14,000 kilometers per second the to simply liquify and literally pass through each other since the time window to acquire and track a boost or post boost vehicle is so short any first layer system must be space-based there isn't time to get it into position it must always be there Red Team Blue team countermeasure analysis has shown the singlet system to be the most effective while packing up to 12 brilliant pebbles on one station would be more efficient it becomes a meaningful target to an enemy in much the same way a post boost busses when the system is deployed brilliant pebbles will consist of four thousand 67 individual weapons poised in space ready to strike the cost of destroying a singlet system approaches the cost of a nuclear attack by an enemy it's just not feasible once the attack command is issued brilliant pebbles is self-contained and independent each pebble carries a life jacket to protect its computers and components from radiation and the whole unit from space dust and debris the jacket also contains the solar array to power the weapon while it sits quietly in space waiting to strike since a Geo stable orbit would put the pebble too far away to get to its target in time each pebble has a star tracking system which monitors its location at all times its own tracking and communication systems allow BP to find an attack it's boosting and post boost target independently and ensure that each pebble attacks a different target with no further information from C cubed once the release command is issued one of the most significant SDI tests to date was the full duration flight test of a space-based interceptors soon to become brilliant pebbles this hubbard test brought together all the elements of acquisition tracking control and independent operation this vehicle is tracking a heat source similar to a boosting rocket on the other side of the wall it was operating totally on its own one of the most exciting moments this one the system handed off the phone to the missile hard body for final lethal intercept while it must remain in space indefinitely the active life of a brilliant pebble is under 30 seconds at the end of 1990 another hundred tests was successfully conducted here the vehicle with all its controls in the canopy is tiny compared to the first test vehicle this miniaturized the cost of boosting into space and makes a brilliant pebble truly a pebble and much more difficult to find SDI phase two consists of programs and systems with longer lead times and more technology challenges they are designed to provide layers to SDI a layered multi faceted series of defense systems is the SDI strategy knocking out or counter measuring anyone system does not render SDI ineffective there are two kinetic weapons and three speed of light weapon systems head I hypervelocity gun neutral particle beam space-based laser and ground-based laser head eye or high endo atmospheric defense interceptor is similar to phase one GBI only head eye strikes rvs in terminal phase just after any remaining decoys are stripped away by the atmosphere in an ideal situation head I would not be needed because all warheads would have been destroyed in boost or mid-course the hypervelocity genre hgg is in some ways the simplest weapon a very very high speed projectile fired from space or ground to electromagnetic acceleration neutral particle beams have been propagated on earth for some time they are immensely powerful but the real question is how will they behave in the vacuum of space and can the accelerators and power systems be made small enough to be put into space laser weapons are both ground and space-based right now the space-based laser may be the most effective in the interactive discrimination of targets from decoys they would be chemical lasers ground-based lasers can get all the power they need there are no real size limitations the challenge is to get the beam into space through the atmosphere and direct it to a target the first head eye flight test was conducted January 26th 1990 it lasted only seven seconds but it proved a lot at the very high speeds achieved by head eye at least seventy eight hundred feet per second both the bow wave and heat at the nose tip of the vehicle can make the seeker sensors unreliable a cryogenic cooler is sprayed over the LW IR window this instantly reduces the temperature to 100 degrees Fahrenheit while all the attention in SDI is focused on the weapons and kills themselves without something as seemingly mundane as cooling a seeker window for just a few seconds there could be no intercept no high impact high visibility effect imagine firing a hockey puck so fast it will penetrate one inch of tempered steel that essentially is an hvg it's like a machine gun only the bullets are accelerated not by a chemical explosion but by electromagnetic acceleration the acceleration is 100,000 G's that's right 100,000 times the force of gravity to put it in perspective a fighter pilot maxes out at about 10 GS h VG's can be space-based or ground-based the launch velocity of a space-based gun would be about 10 km/s a high-powered hunting rifle carries a muzzle velocity of 2,900 feet per second hv g muzzle velocity is over 32,000 feet per second you can see what it does to steel plating imagine what it can do to the thin skin of a ballistic missile neutral particle beam is one of the more exotic SDI systems it works primarily by totally scrambling the control and computer systems of the incoming missile or RV a neutral particle beam is a stream of highly accelerated negative ions the technology has been around for years in fact one promising approach is the Soviet developed RFQ or radiofrequency quadrupole system it's chief advantage is its light weight MP B can also be used to mark or paint warheads and allow other kill weapons to distinguish warheads from decoys a major challenge is to reduce the size of NPB accelerators so they can be boosted into space and to generate the kind of power needed accelerator size has been reduced surely as you can see but it is mandatory that power in the range of 50 mevs be maintained that's 50 million electron volts the bear test launched on July 13th 1989 was the first successful operation in a directed-energy weapon in space it proved that directed energy can be reliably operated in space the future of space-based SDI lasers is found in the Alpha laser which became operational in April 1989 this is a chemical based laser it has the advantage of low power consumption and smaller size space-based lasers have the further advantage of no atmospheric distortion and can go straight line to the target with lethality demonstrated the next major step is beam control and pointing as the old joke goes it's all done with mirrors the lamp or a large advanced mirror program is designed to achieve this when operational lamp will be several times larger than the Hubble Space Telescope even if full lethality is not achieved with a chemical space-based laser its ability to destroy decoys especially balloon decoys thermally tank warheads and create a velocity change signature on the warhead will make kills by other layers of SDI easier and faster ever since an atmospheric Lee corrected laser tracked a booster rocket in 1985 the ability to propagate a laser beam from the ground into space seemed feasible laser light is absolutely parallel a distortion in the atmosphere like the wavy shimmering you see looking out over the road on a hot summer day reduces the lasers effectiveness SDI computers are now calculating the distortion in real time and adjusting the mirror to compensate for such distortion creating a true and effective laser beam as it emerges from the atmosphere in February 1990 a delta 2 launched both lace and rme into space lace is a two and 1/2 year low-power atmospheric compensation experiment to further refine beam distortion issues rme will demonstrate the ability to reflect a laser beam from a space mirror and point to a target such a target may be a series of fighting mirrors which in turn will divide the beam and aim multiple beams at multiple targets GBL is not limited in power due to boosting weight limits one of the more promising paths for ground-based lasers is fel or free electron laser electrons are jarred loose from their atoms and fed as bundles or electron bullets into a laser beam such an approach increases the lethality of the beam while offering the possibility of lower power consumption this translates into more lasers at the same cost in this video we attempted to give you an overview of SDI only outline its many successes and look at some of SDI's more interesting systems over the next 12 months a significant number of SDI systems will be tested in a series of Valda more validation and demonstration tests these tests will focus more on full systems and system integration and less on components than in the past several years some of the experiments for 1991-92 include the first brilliant pebbles intercept the 16 millimeter hyper velocity gun the first leap for lightweight exo-atmospheric projectile intercept the first Aris mid-course discrimination and intercept the first head eye intercept of a terminal RV the first mid power neutral particle beam demonstration this one is still on the ground and finally the first full power free electron laser beam demonstration will track all the activities and more and issue our findings in the next

Channel: theflinx

Views: 122,041

Rating: 4.7908163 out of 5

Keywords: sdi, Strategic Defense Initiative, Star Wars, 1980's, eighties, Ronald, Reagan, Ronald Reagan, strategic, defense, initiative, star, wars, 80's, 80s, 1980s, rocket, rockets, space, laser, lasers, space Lasers, particle, beam, weapon, weapons, intercept, Nuclear, Destruction, Atomic, Destroy, kinetic, energy, kill, vehicle, hit, bullet, with, shield, brilliant, pebbles, smart, to, based

Id: yDCzpAuWM1w

Length: 31min 54sec (1914 seconds)

Published: Thu Feb 09 2012

Reddit Comments

[u/sedmonster]

| kinetic energy weapons

Is that when you throw your gun at the enemy?

[u/DrColdReality]

Few people today realize that we went ahead and actually built and deployed a small part of this system, despite the fact that it never worked even once in testing.

What they did conclusively demonstrate during testing was that if one or two enemy nukes are launched with plenty of warning and in daylight and good weather, if the missiles either don't use decoys or they--no kidding--put a homing beacon on the real warheads, then we can almost kinda sometimes come very close to maybe shooting them down. Perhaps.

Such minor, nitpicky details didn't stop them from declaring the system operational, and building two bases, one in Alaska, the other in California, which each suck up a billion more dollars a year waiting for Soviet nukes to fly over the horizon. The military is agitating to build a third, on the east coast.

And mind you, this system--even if it worked--was only designed to target ICBMs, missiles launched from another continent. A sub parked off the coast could lob nuclear missiles at us with impunity.

This is why we can't have nice things.

[u/BoldGambit]

People say that SDI did not work and that's only partially true. None of the demonstrations/experiments during the 1980s succeeded. But SDI was a long term investment, the end product was not even expected to be operational before the 2000s.

SDI was also an open ended technology development program that had many facets. Massive amounts of funds were spent investing in a variety of fields such as:

Flexible Optics Autonomous Vehicles Enhanced Communications Supercomputing Artificial Intelligence Advanced Materials Science Space Exploration/Exploitation High-energy Physics Smart Sensors

When ever people tell me they wish the government would poor more money into science and technology or think long term, I point to SDI.

[u/squeeeeeeeeeeeeeeebs]

"In 1986 Carl Sagan summarized what he heard Soviet commentators were saying about SDI, with a common argument being that it was equivalent to starting an economic war through a defensive arms race to further cripple the Soviet Economy with extra military spending"

The Soviet Union collapsed because their economy was in the shitter. SDI served it's purpose, the Soviets massively overspent on their military.

[u/FakeyFaked]

The point of sinking money and building something that we absolutely knew we did not have the capability of making work was far more of a psychological weapon than an actual one. Star Wars scared the crap out of Russians. It threatened the idea of mutually assured destruction that kept the Cold War cold. As a result, Russia sank much more money into its war machine to try and maintain some type of equality with the US.

I'm not saying it won the Cold War, but it was likely a factor in pressing the Soviet economy to its limits.

[u/jrsherrod]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RIM-161_Standard_Missile_3 - It's real. The number of Americans who even know the Missile Defense Agency exists? Pretty low.

Also this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terminal_High_Altitude_Area_Defense

http://www.defense.gov/News/News-Transcripts/Transcript-View/Article/607005/department-of-defense-briefing-by-vice-adm-syring-on-the-fiscal-year-2016-missi

Say what's up to our friends over at the Defense Department! Thanks for your service, folks.

[u/TwoSugarsBlackPlease]

SDI is far from the blunder that everyone makes it out to be, it pushed massive funding into large projects like supercomputing, laser and xray technology, satellite tracking and targeting, nuclear rocket research (project: timberwind) and loads of other areas. Aegis baseline 9, ABM lasers, SM-3IIB and other weapons systems are the results of SDI and follow on programs. We are at a point where instead of just hitting a bullet with a bullet, we can now hit a specific spot on a bullet.

[u/avid_pooper]

https://historyrat.wordpress.com/tag/sdi/ This comic pissed me off to no end in high school.

[u/[deleted]]

When I was very young in the 1980's there was a ton of people against this. Don't have the time to watch it so I don't know if the video goes into it but from what I gather it's because it would encourage the other side to build even more nukes. Even if it worked some would naturally get by and the idea was to overwhelm the defense system.

Back then I didn't know what it was I just thought it sounded cool as hell. Now that I'm older I know what it is and I still think it's cool as hell.