Lockheed to develop fighter jet laser cannon

News

Lockheed Martin has been awarded $26m by the US government’s Air Force Research Lab (AFRL) to develop a high-power fibre laser that will be tested on a fighter jet by 2021.

The contract to develop the laser is part of AFRL’s Self-protect High Energy Laser Demonstrator (SHiELD) program, which is developing all of the technologies required to install and operate a high energy laser weapon on an aircraft.

Last year AFRL also awarded contracts worth a reported $90m to Boeing to develop the pod in which the laser will be housed, and $39m to Northrop Grumman, which is responsible for the beam control system that will track targets, compensate for atmospheric conditions that could distort the laser beam, and focus the outgoing beam on the target.

Lockheed’s portion of the project, known as LANCE (Laser Advancements for Next-generation Compact Environments) will see the development a high-power fibre laser that will disable targets.

As previously reported by The Engineer, Lockheed has been developing technology based around fibre laser beam combining – a technique in which beams from multiple fibre laser modules are combined to form a single, powerful, high quality beam – for a number of years now.

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