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NICK COOK JDW Aerospace Consultant London The Phantom Works, Boeing's prototyping organisation, has raised the possibility of plasma-based directed-energy weapons equipping a future breed of hypersonic aircraft platforms, such as those favoured for research and development by the Bush administration. George Muellner, vice president and general manager of the Phantom Works, said that it should prove feasible to "skim off" some of the plasma that forms naturally around a M8.0 aerospace vehicle for use by an onboard directed-energy weapon. Plasmas are ionised gases found naturally in lightning discharges and are commonly used in neon light tubes. They also build around the nose and leading edges of hypersonic vehicles and space re-entry systems as the air in front of them is shocked to high temperature. Muellner's remarks are evidence of growing US interest in plasmas for a variety of aerospace applications. Russian designers have touted the benefits of plasmas for years, but officially their claims have been greeted with scepticism by the US aerospace establishment. Russian companies and research institutions that have applied plasmas to aircraft have reported sizeable reductions in aircraft drag and the delayed onset of shock waves. "We've been doing work with the Russians and we've been doing plasma work on our own and we have seen considerable improvements in drag and sonic boom attenuation," Muellner said. He downplayed US enthusiasm for other plasma benefit claimed by the Russians - a means of drastically reducing an aircraft's radar signature. "There's no way to effectively engineer it," he said, adding that the power and weight penalties imposed by plasma-generators would most likely outweigh the stealth benefits. Despite this, Russian engineers claim to have developed 'bolt-on' plasma-generators that dramatically cut an aircraft's radar cross-section while preserving its aerodynamic qualities; something, they say, that cannot be said of first-generation US stealth aircraft like the angular F-117A. Muellner said that the use of naturally forming plasmas on a high-Mach aerospace vehicle could, in the long term, be applied "as a huge energy resource" to a directed-energy weapon for self-defence purposes. Observers have pointed out that such weapons could also be used offensively. There are two possible engineering approaches. One is to divert the plasma into a chamber, excite it, introduce a laser-critical gas such as argon and direct the resultant energy through high-power optics as a laser beam. The other is to wrap small compact rings or 'toroids' of plasma energy in intense magnetic fields and fire them from a weapon as 'bullets' at air or ground targets. In the early 1990s, the US Air Force was preparing tests at Kirtland Air Force Base, New Mexico, designed to lead to a ground-based plasma-weapon in the late 1990s capable of firing plasma bullets at incoming ballistic missile warheads. The enabling technology was a 'fast capacitor bank' called Shiva Star that could store 10 million joules of energy and release it instantaneously. Officials anticipated firing bullets at 3,000km/sec in 1995 and 10,000km/sec - 3% of the speed of light - by the turn of the century. The tests absorbed little more than a few million dollars of annual funding (Jane's Defence Weekly 29 July 1998). Dumped into the 'soft' electronics of a re-entry vehicle, the bullets were envisaged as destroying multiple manoeuvring warheads at rapid reacquisition rates. By the second half of the last decade, the Shiva/plasma bullet programme was officially dropped. Observers have remarked on how its sudden disappearance at the time the firing tests were scheduled was redolent of a transition to the classified environment.
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