Building Space-Based Laser Weapons During America's 'Star Wars' Era
Former Strategic Defense Initiative optical engineer Gary Golnik talks early laser weapon R&D, technical challenges, and the Cold War "laser gap."
Welcome to Laser Focus, an occasional interview series with subject matter experts in the directed energy space.
Gary Golnik is a retired optical engineer who worked on space-based laser weapons from 1975 to 1999 through defense contractors Pratt & Whitney, TRW, and W. J. Schafer Associates. At Schafer, Golnik was part of experimental teams working on several laser weapon efforts under President Ronald Reagan’s Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI), commonly known as “Star Wars.” He was most recently an optical system engineer for NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope until his retirement in 2022.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
LASER WARS: How did you end up working for the Strategic Defense Initiative Organization (SDIO)?
GARY GOLNIK: I ended up there purely by happenstance.
I had been in a PhD program and was doing miserably, so my wife and I decided that we should get out of it. I had gone to an Optical Society of America1 meeting in Boston in 1975 looking for a job. I didn’t really know anything about the business, but one of the companies recruiting was Pratt and Whitney, and between them, TRW and Rocketdyne, they basically hired the entire graduating class of both the University of Rochester and University of Arizona’s optical institutes that year. My boss told me later, “ we hired 16 people for eight positions and figured we’d keep the best eight after we saw whether you worked out.”
At Pratt & Whitney, we were working on something called the XLD-1, or Experimental Laser Device,2 that was being built as a technology demonstrator for the Airborne Laser Laboratory (ALL).3 It was a carbon dioxide gas dynamic laser that was used in a series of experiments in Florida in parallel to the ALL.
I worked for Pratt & Whitney for about three-and-a-half years, but they were not doing too well in the competition for laser devices. When it looked like they were going to scale back and get out of the device business, I had a choice of either going to TRW or Rocketdyne (because the third option was Bell Aerospace, and I didn’t want to live in Buffalo). I went to TRW for about five years and worked on their chemical laser program, primarily building optical diagnostics and then developing technology to look interferometrically at gas flows and the mirrors of the resonator and whatnot. I then transitioned from the experimental side and got a job as optical systems engineer for what was then called the Alpha program, which was a cylindrical laser to deploy to space.4
After our son was born, my wife and I decided we wanted to move back East, so we moved to Massachusetts and I went to work for W. J. Schafer Associates. We were the Systems Engineering and Technical Assistance (SETA) contractor to both the US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) and the US Air Force, and then that transitioned into the SDIO and then the Ballistic Missile Defense Organization (BMDO) and Missile Defense Agency (MDA), and, you know, whatever acronym the government was using at the time.
I worked on many of the technology development programs for large optics. I worked with the Alpha laser and Large Advanced Mirror Program (LAMP). I was one of the first people to be asked to put together a plan for integrating them, which turned into the Alpha-LAMP Integration (ALI) program,5 which then developed into a series of space-based laser demonstrator programs.
That all ran up to about 1998 or so, and then about that time they decided that they wanted everyone working on the program to be a resident of California. I wasn’t about to do that because my first wife at the time was very ill, so I ended up getting out of that. A friend of mine at NASA asked me to help out with a couple of odd jobs, and that eventually developed into a role of optical systems engineer on the James Webb Space Telescope, which filled out the next 20-plus years of my career. I worked on that until just before the launch and then retired.
What were some of the major technical hurdles that you recall confronting with space-based laser weapon systems? Power? Optics? Beam control?
All of the above. The three generic categories are generating enough power with a good enough beam quality, building a large enough beam director so that you could get the ranges you need just to overcome diffraction, and then the pointing and tracking to identify and put the beam on a target. In a lot of programs and in a lot of science fiction books, everybody concentrates on the first one: how much power do you have? But raw power doesn’t help: I mean, the Mid-Infrared Advanced Chemical Laser (MIRACL) had a lot of raw power and particularly good beam quality, but it was in a configuration that was a little hard to couple with a beam director.
One of the most critical challenges was packing efficiency — how much gain you can get out per pound of chemical propellant? The test lasers at the time were long, linear things that were very difficult to package. The Alpha laser was a cylindrical laser that consisted of a series of rings stacked top of each other, which made it very scalable. The rage these days is all electrical lasers, and in those days the rage was still electric, too, but look at it from a systems point of view: if you have to generate your electricity in space, and if you’re talking about significant power, you’re never going to get it out of solar cells or anything that’s not a chemical generator. The major technology problems to generate the amount of optical power that we needed were well on the way to being solved — I’m not saying that they were solved, but they were well on the way. The major scaling issues had pretty much been addressed.
Then, from an optical beam director point of view, we knew as early as LAMP that we were going to need a segmented approach, because we wanted large optics. There was a lot of argument about, “gee, can you do an eight meter optic and you can do it in space?” But we demonstrated it on the ground and showed that it worked at high power. We integrated Alpha and LAMP and showed that we could handle the power.
The third major technology challenge was the pointing and tracking for trying to kill missiles at 5,000 kilometers. That range of 5,000 km is purely driven by the geometry of your constellations and how many platforms you need, how much overlap you need, and how many targets you’re going to get. There was this whole misconception early on, at the highest levels, that, you know, you needed to sell the whole system — in reality, you could put up a single capable platform and it would do what it could do because every once in a while, it would be in the right place at the right time, and you could do things with it. If the surveillance community had operated in that kind of a mode, we would have never had a surveillance community. Despite science fiction, we’ve never had the ability to see everywhere on the Earth in real time — that’s not classified, it’s just simple orbital dynamics.
So think of it now as: we had the capability of fielding a laser and beam director that would have been able to, say, demonstrate to the North Koreans that we could shoot down one of their launches once in a while. But the pointing and tracking was always a problem, because when you’re talking about trying to hold the beam steady across distances of 5,000 km. I think the classic analogy was that it’s the size of a quarter from New York to Los Angeles, and holding the jitter down was very, very difficult.
What was the atmosphere like working for SDI given the Cold War context? Was it driven by fear? Scientific curiosity? Pure ambition?
It was scientific curiosity driven by a realization that the Russians posed a real and significant threat, and that we had a potential for doing something about that threat. It wasn’t by any means a crash wartime “black” project, but we were constantly looking at what they were doing, both from the laser technology side and the missile side, trying to figure out what we could do about them.
Our biggest impediments weren’t the Russians, though — they were simply the goal. Rather, it was the Democratic congressmen and their lawyers and the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty. There were two tacks they used to disrupt the program. One was kind of the direct attack of, “you can’t do this because it’s not allowed by the treaty, and so therefore we don’t have to fund it.” This was effective up to a point but lost its utility when Reagan announced the “Star Wars” program, which basically forced funding through for the project.6
But unfortunately, what happened next was a classic Lucy and Charlie Brown moving football situation. We went from asking, “can we shoot down a missile,” to “these missiles have multiple warheads, so can you shoot down all of them” to “there’s 10,000 missiles that are going to be launched simultaneously, can you shoot down all of them?” The requirements of the program kept changing: rather than being a technology-driven program aimed at producing a demonstrator to show that we could put something in space and engage a target, we got into a series of architecture studies that said, “in order to handle this threat, you’re going to have to spend more money than you can spend on technology you haven’t demonstrated yet … and since we’re never going to be able to afford that, why bother to demonstrate it in the first place?”
SDIO persevered in the face of that and did fairly well. But the other big problem with the program was that the organization tried to do too many things all at once. They tried a bunch of technologies: they wanted to do intercepts in space, ground-based interceptors, ground-based lasers. All of these things were good ideas that could have had a future, but they were trying to juggle too many things at once, and none of them really got the funding that they needed until the Pentagon finally said, “all right, we’re not going to do this other technology stuff, we’re just going to concentrate on building missiles to shoot down missiles.” So a lot of the technology was put aside and lost to antiquity.
One of my favorite geopolitical phenomena is the myth of the “laser gap” with the Soviet Union promulgated by the US intelligence community. What was your perception of that at the time? Did it seem like the Soviets were far ahead when it came to directed energy?
There certainly was some truth to the laser gap. If you think of a laser purely as a power generator and not as a weapon system — and by that, I mean that the weapon system has a laser, a beam director, and acquisition and tracking system integrated into some sort of platform, along with the software to run it and communicate it to the rest of the battle space — then the Russians certainly had excellent technical people. A lot of work that we did in gas dynamic lasers and in computational fluid dynamics certainly was in parallel with, sometimes a little ahead of, sometimes a little behind the Russian scientists at the time. I think there was a perception that they had a larger ground-based laser than the US had and were able to point this at space.
We had some people that worked for us at Schafer that were part of the American teams that went to Russia in later years and interfaced directly with the Russians when treaties were allowing that. But my impression is that the Russians had a large ground-based laser and relatively primitive means of aiming it at the sky. I suspect that we had laser systems contemporaneously, and certainly by the days of MIRACL and Alpha, that were ahead of the Russians in that regard. I think we were always ahead of them in precision optical technology and the ability to build beam directors. We never took, as far as I know, one of our big lasers and tried to point it in the sky. We pointed it at missiles and helicopters and downed pressurized segments of Titan rockets and things like that.
So I think the “laser gap” was real in the sense of a different tack, and led to a potential anti-satellite system earlier than we did.7 I think we could have fielded an equally good anti-satellite weapon at the same time if we had wanted to. There might have been a year or two where either we or the Russians were ahead in one particular technology, which continued up until the Soviet Union didn’t have the money to do anything. But it wasn’t ever one of these, “oh my God, they did this, and we have to go on and do this now too.” Really it was, “that’s nice, but we’re working on stuff that’s really going to work.”
One last thing: What’s your favorite fictional laser weapon?
I’m a space opera fan, so I’d have to say my favorite fictional laser weapon system isn’t really a laser — it’s a graser from David Weber’s Honor Harrington series, which is a short for a gamma ray laser. He postulates a system which could be feasible — although he is another one of those power-centric people that ignores the rest of the system — and given the technology he’s claiming, it is certainly possible to build a gamma ray laser and beam director and focus it on a target.
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The XLD-1 hit a power output of 77 kilowatts during testing at a Pratt & Whitney facility in West Palm Beach, Florida in 1968.
Initiated in 1971, the ALL program sought to install a large carbon dioxide laser weapon on a specialized Boeing KC–135 tanker aircraft. The program culminated in 1983 with series of tests that saw the system disable of several Sidewinder AIM–9B missiles and BQM–34A drone targets, according to an excellent history of airborne laser weapon R&D from former Secretary of the Air Force Hans Mark.
A chemical laser weapon developed as part of the Zenith Star program that Reagan secretly established in 1985.
The BMDO integrated the Alpha laser with LAMP’s mirror and beam control system and began conducting high power tests in 1997.
Somewhat correct, but if you want to know the real story, contact me.