Page 183 - MY STORY

military satellite antennas. We convinced management to

buy a 7 KW CO2 welding laser, and couple it to our 8-foot
diameter vacuum space chamber in our labs so we could
simulate laser encounters in a space environment. We

had found our niche!

LASER KILLERS?
Don K moved on to take over MDAC’s foray into Fusion
Energy. I made it clear to senior management that if they
didn’t give me Don’s job as Chief M&P Engineer, I would

not stay with the organization. They did not offer me the
job and so I took the next step of forming a small group to

work HEL vulnerability and hardening. We did a pretty
good job performing on the previous HEL antenna V&H
program and thought we had developed a pretty
impressive test capability by marrying a laser with our

vacuum space chamber.

We found out the AFRL folk were coming out with a
much larger HEL V&H program aimed at military
satellites, labeled Satellite Materials Hardening (SMATH)

in 1978. The intent of this upcoming program was to
study the vulnerability of military satellite subsystems to
ground-based HEL’s and develop methods to protect

these subsystems from the threat.