Chapter 11

After I read the white paper on Project Pathfinder, I reached for my research journal that I had been keeping since I was an undergraduate at UNLV. Back then I did research in high-temperature superconductivity for one Professor Maxine Chu, who later went on to become a Fellow of the National Academy of Science. We found a novel way to heat and cool high temperature superconductors such that they retained their superconducting properties below the critical temperature, below which superconductivity happens. She supervised me on my senior honors thesis at UNLV.

Since I kept continuous paging in my research journals, by the time I became a postdoc at NRL I had already 30,000 pages of handwritten notes. I used ordinary black composition books that the school children use to do their writing assignments. I preferred to use the kind with graph paper, but lined paper would do.

I made notes on Project Pathfinder and my interpretation of the whole thing. The Dual Laser Guidance System (DLGS) used two Terawatt lasers, one continuous wave and the other pulsed. Each laser emitted enough power to light Las Vegas. From the specifications of the dual lasers, I saw that each was small enough to be mounted on a large frigate. The Navy had a special experimental frigate it called the Laser Platform Frigate (LPF).

A separate experimental guided missile cruiser launched the HSASMs. The Navy called it the Jonah Guided Missile Cruiser (GMC). The two US Navy vessels would work in tandem to use the DLGS to detect and track enemy satellites. Further DLGS would be used to guide the HSASM to the targeted enemy satellite, thus destroying it.

I read more of the specifications. The Continuous Wave Terawatt Laser (CWTL) served to heat up the targeted satellite against the cold background of outer space. The Pulsed Terawatt Laser (PTL) served to heat the circuitry of the enemy satellite by illuimating its solar power panels with a fixed frequency of powerful laser pulses through a process scientists call Joule heating.

The effect was to induce thermal flashing in the infrared region of the electromagnetic spectrum. The targeted enemy satellite would flash like a Christmas light only in the invisible infrared spectrum. A land-based telescope observed the thermal flashing in the infrared band. This information was sent by short wave radio to the Jonah Guided Missile Cruiser and to the Laser Platform Frigate.

It turned out that my summer research as a graduate student allowed the US Department of Defense to derive a mathematical relationship between the frequency of the laser pulses from the PTL and the frequency of the thermal infrared flashing of the enemy satellite. The actual relationship was Top Secret, so I didn't know what it was, but I had helped DoD find it.

Through a process I did not know, the Heat Seeking Antisatellite Missiles locked onto this frequency of infrared thermal flashing and destroyed the targeted satellite. Project Pathfinder was part of a larger umbrella project DoD called Project Whirlwind. This was the Laser Guided Antisatellite Tracking and Elimination (LGATE) project. Under Project Whirlwind, at the same level as Project Pathfinder, was Project Scorpion, or the Scorpion Missile, code name HSASM. This was none of my concern, and the white paper on Project Pathfinder was all I really needed to know, at that point.