Prospects of ‘Star Wars’ Spinoffs Stir Hope, Doubt

President Reagan’s space-based missile defense program, which will soon be 4 years old, has yet to intercept its first missile with a laser, destroy a target with a particle beam or knock anything out of the sky with a rail gun.

But its boosters already insist that even if the so-called “Star Wars” project never keeps those promises, it will produce technological spinoffs of untold value for conventional arms.

Sen. Sam Nunn (D-Ga.), who will chair the Senate Armed Services Committee this year, suggests that the Soviet Union is afraid of “Star Wars” not because of its potential as an anti-missile shield but because of the likely military spinoffs.

Some scientists also hold out hope that lasers developed for “Star Wars” can be used for everything from taking the salt out of seawater to providing improved automobile tail lights, and that the mirrors used to reflect the lasers’ concentrated beams toward oncoming missiles could also be used to light highways and airports.

But critics remain unimpressed. Some doubt many of the Strategic Defense Initiative’s breakthroughs will prove to be very practical otherwise. And rather than stimulating conventional weapons improvement and commercial technology, they contend, “Star Wars” is likely to drain scientific talent from more productive pursuits, thus impeding university research and slowing the development of commercial high technology.

With Democrats back in control of the Senate, the program’s benefits and costs are expected to be subjected this congressional session to the closest scrutiny since “Star Wars” was launched in March of 1983.

Nunn, who has championed the cause of conventional arms, has already declared his intention to push hard for more defense for less money, and critics of the Strategic Defense Initiative maintain that this compels a hard new look at the program that stands to be the most expensive military undertaking in history.

From the outset of the program, President Reagan has asserted that there is more to it than its quixotic objective of making intercontinental ballistic missiles obsolete.

Cites Space Program

Campaigning in Colorado four days before the November elections, Reagan compared the potential commercial impact of the strategic defense program to the spinoff from the civilian space program in its early years.

“Just as America’s space program created new jobs and industries, SDI could open whole new fields of technology and industry,” he said, “providing jobs for thousands right here in Colorado and improving the quality of life in America and around the world.”

Already, enthusiasts and some scientists say, the SDI research is providing myriad potential applications that could benefit manufacturing industries, communications, medicine, conventional defense systems and other fields.

It is suggested, for example, that the precise pointing and tracking instruments required in a ballistic missile defense system could be readily adaptable to commercial air traffic control.

Multiple Possibilities

The new lasers, in addition to possible uses in desalinization and auto lights, could perform delicate surgery, and the new beam-reflecting mirrors could have any number of common uses where powerful illumination is needed.

“We are beginning to explore the use of molecular engineering to create new classes of materials that do not exist in nature,” said James Ionson, director of the Strategic Defense Initiative Organization’s Office of Innovative Science and Technology, which is part of the Defense Department.

“Some of the things we are striving to develop are extremely lightweight and highly thermal resistant, and what you could eventually find is that these materials will be used to make automobile engines.”

Of the potential spinoffs into conventional weaponry, nothing has received more attention than the electromagnetic rail gun, an energy weapon that accelerates metallic pellets to enormous velocities by varying magnetic fields between two “rails”.

‘Booster Buster’

In its “Star Wars” incarnation, it is has been viewed as a “booster buster,” an interceptor capable of accelerating projectiles toward enemy missiles at speeds of at least several miles per second, in effect hitting a bullet with a bullet. If it is built small enough, it could be a devastating weapon against heavily armored vehicles--Soviet tanks.

One problem is that the rail guns being looked at for SDI, which would be mounted on the ground or on a space platform, are still the length of a football field. But, said William Weldon, director of the University of Texas Center for Electromechanics, “Developing a rail gun for anti-armor purposes is probably less challenging than developing it for ‘Star Wars.’ ”

Weldon and other researchers also are looking at another potential role for the electromagnetic gun--as a device to spray metallic coatings onto surfaces where perfect bonding is necessary for corrosion resistance, hardening or the coating of alloys.

Could Coat Ships

“There is also interest in using the technique to coat ship hulls with bronze or something so they do not have to be periodically pulled out of the water and scraped off and re-coated with anti-fouling paint,” he said. “Hulls could be permanently protected.”

But critics argue that for all the fascination over “Star Wars” gadgets such as the rail gun, the successful spinoff application of much of the SDI technology is doubtful, and if it proves out, would come at a greater cost than if pursued directly.

“Civilian spinoffs from military spending have become harder and harder to find,” MIT economist Lester Thurow wrote in Technology Review earlier this year. “The requirements for operating in space are very different from those on earth. Extreme lightness, miniaturization and reliability are of much less value on earth than in space.

“We can find many examples of civilian spinoffs from the military in the distant past--the Boeing commercial jet airliner, for instance,” he said. “But there are few in the recent past. In fact, the major inventions of the past few decades have spun off from the civilian economy to the military. The transistor was invented by AT&T.; Semiconductor chips were developed by an oil-well instrument company--Texas Instruments--and personal computers were developed by hackers.”

Gains Made Elsewhere

Moreover, some critics said, there may be few real technological advances that “Star Wars,” despite its grand scope, can claim as its own.

The Army and the Defense Department’s Advanced Research Projects Agency were already conducting research on rail guns, as were university researchers who used them to simulate the effect of micrometeorites on space vehicles. The Navy is trying to develop lasers to defend its ships against cruise missiles.

“The first question I have to ask about SDI contributions to conventional weapons is the extent to which all of this stuff they are working on was already being done somewhere else,” said John Pike, an analyst for the Federation of American Scientists. “I can walk down a long list of it.”

Perhaps the greatest question, and the subject of the sharpest debate, is whether “Star Wars,” as history’s most expensive research and development program, stands to broadly stimulate technical and scientific productivity.

Explosion in Optics

As an illustration of technologies already given “a shot in the arm” by SDI research, Berkeley-trained physicist Louis Marquet points to optics, a field that many predict will have the technological and commercial impact in the years just ahead that electronics had in the 1960s and 1970s.

“SDI is not spending a lot of money on (optics) in terms of direct contracting. But if you look at what is happening in industry, you will see that the whole concept has just exploded over the last couple of years,” he said.

Until recently, the United States had only two schools with broad-based optical education programs extending from undergraduate training through doctoral degrees--the University of Rochester and the University of Arizona.

But about the time that Reagan launched the SDI program, the University of Alabama at Huntsville responded to the recommendation from government and aerospace industry experts and launched an ambitious optics program. It now has a dozen undergraduate students and 40 graduate students.

“My great concern is that this country will lose optics to the Japanese the way we lost electronics,” said John Caulfield, director of the Alabama program. “ . . . We need 10 or 12 more schools right now.”

While supporters of the SDI program contend it is a driving force in the hottest new fields of high technology, critics maintain that commercial development stands to suffer because of the “Star Wars” program and its military secrecy. “If it gets to a point where SDI imposes a lot of restraints, then it is going to be extremely harmful to the country.” said Sidney Drell of Stanford University, who is president of the American Physical Society.

There are also assertions that SDI will have a negative effect on commercial technology by creating a brain drain from fields where there is a shortage of talent, such as optics. Suggesting that the program could “crowd out” worthwhile civilian research and development and contribute to a shortage of engineers and scientists, a study by the New York-based Council on Economic Priorities noted that “SDI compares in size to the largest procurement programs in the Pentagon budget, including the Peacekeeper MX missile and the B-1B bomber.

Might Skew Economy

“If strategic defense technologies reach full-scale development, the macroeconomic impacts could be substantially greater,” the study said.

The Defense Department’s SDI organization has been attentive to the importance of technological spinoff. It has given the subject priority in both its Office of Innovative Science and Technology, which sponsors mostly unclassified research, and its Office of Educational and Civilian Applications.

The Office of Innovative Science and Technology receives so many research proposals that it can support only a fraction of them, and it has been criticized for supporting too many at the expense of quality control.

Although many experts debate the true spinoff value of SDI, few can dispute that the Soviet Union is taking it into serious account.

Other Military Problems

“The main error that people make in thinking about SDI arises from their need to visualize what they are thinking about, and so people watch television, and they invariably think about satellites zapping missiles with laser beams,” said R. James Woolsey, a former Navy undersecretary and a former U.S. arms negotiator. “So people tend to think that the laser is the only thing.”

“The fact is that directed energy weapons get only a small part of the SDI budget, maybe 10%. What the Russians are worried about,” he said, is how SDI-related technology will be applied to other military problems. For example, “they know that in doing computer work for SDI, we are probably doing work that needs to be done for the air defense of Europe,” Woolsey said.