SDI Brilliant Pebbles

mz

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I've heard about a rocket craft hovering in a hangar and laser pointing an outside target as a systems/targeting demonstration, anybody have more info on this?
 
Google for 'Brilliant Pebbles'

Brilliant Pebbles was a non-nuclear system of satellite-based, watermelon-sized,[21] mini-missiles designed to use a high-velocity kinetic warhead.[22] It was designed to operate in conjunction with the Brilliant Eyes sensor system and would have detected and destroyed missiles without any external guidance. The project was conceived in November 1986.[23]

John H. Nuckolls, director of Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory from 1988 to 1994, described the system as “The crowning achievement of the Strategic Defense Initiative”. The technologies developed for SDI were used in numerous later projects. For example, the sensors and cameras that were developed for Brilliant Pebbles became components of the Clementine mission and SDI technologies may also have a role in future missile defense efforts.[24]

http://www.heritage.org/Research/NationalSecurity/bg748.cfm
http://www.globalsecurity.org/space/systems/bp.htm
http://www.answers.com/topic/strategic-defense-initiative
http://www.defensetech.org/archives/001693.html
http://www.thespacereview.com/article/368/1

Though regarded as one of the most capable SDI systems, the Brilliant Pebbles program was canceled in 1994 by the BMDO.[25] However, it is being reevaluated for possible future use by the MDA.

BP ressurected as MKV - Multiple Kill Vehicle, ex-Miniature Kill Vehicle, http://www.gizmag.com/go/7888/), there was also good publication on these at AWST and Ares blog with videos.
http://www.aviationweek.com/aw/generic/story_generic.jsp?channel=awst&id=news/aw060208p1.xml&headline=Lockheed%20and%20Raytheon%20Vie%20for%20MKV
http://www.aviationweek.com/aw/blogs/defense/index.jsp?plckController=Blog&plckScript=blogScript&plckElementId=blogDest&plckBlogPage=BlogViewPost&plckPostId=Blog%3A27ec4a53-dcc8-42d0-bd3a-01329aef79a7Post%3A5dcd9c0a-026b-485c-a864-fbfbcb037f53
http://www.aviationweek.com/aw/blogs/defense/index.jsp?plckController=Blog&plckScript=blogScript&plckElementId=blogDest&plckBlogPage=BlogViewPost&plckPostId=Blog%3a27ec4a53-dcc8-42d0-bd3a-01329aef79a7Post%3a450705eb-b9ef-4dcc-8424-d65a33fb635a
http://www.aviationweek.com/media/video/MKV_R_v4_FINAL.wmv

Lockheed Martin won MDA MKV development and demonstration contract.
 
Found cool gallery of SDI-era DoD images at Spiegel site http://einestages.spiegel.de/static/topicalbumbackground/1616/ronald_skywalkers_alptraum.html
 
when I saw the name of the thread , i thought it was some sort of a pun on Brilliant Pebbles, but it isn't. would have been more interesting though...
 
found some nice old illustrations of BP in Livermore National Laboratory report
 

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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RCVPNQhXtq8

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=useVRm4eEL0
 
Conceptual model of a ten-foot long, 350-pound Brilliant Pebble.

Source: Chapman, Gary "Smart Rocks, Brilliant Pebbles, and Genius Dust" Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists November 1989 page 11.
 

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Some details on SBI testing plans from 1987: http://www.dtic.mil/dtic/tr/fulltext/u2/a214020.pdf
 
The Rise and Fall of Brilliant Pebbles
Donald R. Baucom
Missile Defense Agency

Paper presented at “They Taught the World to Fly:The Wright Brothers and the Age of
Flight,” an International Flight Symposium Sponsored by the North Carolina First Flight
Centennial Commission, 23 October 2001
 
There's another similar space based interceptor project that is launched by submarines during time of conflict, the vehicle carrier would hover above the adversary nation, waiting for potential strike. does anyone knows what it is called?
 
I’m surprised there is so little interest in Brilliant Pebbles and push to resurrect the program.

It always seemed to me like an 80’s ideas that belongs in the 2020s: clouds of small, smart cheap components, machine learning, automation, high level of decentralization. If SpaceX, Blue Origin and the crowd of other new/old space fulfill expectations to bring down launch costs dramatically, it’ll be much more affordable, and imaginable to put up the thousands of interceptor satellites needed. Miniaturization and A.I. has vastly improved, hugely so since the 80s when Brilliant Pebbles was conceived. Surely we can build much smaller, cheaper and thus populous interceptors? This has been a fashionable trend in satellite technology: SmallSats, CubeSats, Elon Musks’s humungous internet satellite constellation.
 
skyblue said:
I’m surprised there is so little interest in Brilliant Pebbles and push to resurrect the program.

It always seemed to me like an 80’s ideas that belongs in the 2020s: clouds of small, smart cheap components, machine learning, automation, high level of decentralization. If SpaceX, Blue Origin and the crowd of other new/old space fulfill expectations to bring down launch costs dramatically, it’ll be much more affordable, and imaginable to put up the thousands of interceptor satellites needed. Miniaturization and A.I. has vastly improved, hugely so since the 80s when Brilliant Pebbles was conceived. Surely we can build much smaller, cheaper and thus populous interceptors? This has been a fashionable trend in satellite technology: SmallSats, CubeSats, Elon Musks’s humungous internet satellite constellation.


I noticed the strategic use of "if" in your scenario...

Yeah, things might be a lot cheaper in this theoretical future. But it's never going to be really cheap. Take lots of relatively cheap components and now try to integrate them all. The integration requires a lot of software effort and a lot of people looking over all of that. It's not easy. And it won't be cheap.

Plus, we don't even know if this would work. It requires a lot of spacecraft covering a lot of territory and all connected into a warning and tracking system that might not behave as advertised.
 
Those KKV deals astounded me how rock steady they were in hovering over those nets—making the craft of Armadillo and friends look like wobbly drunks:

View: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=hAT13M5uawM

I have no doubt that the KKV tech can be made even cheaper with additive manufacturing. Clementine used that tech…and I would not be surprised to find it behind the tech that allowed Delta II Mars probes that also had to be small.

The old hover articles are now museum pieces:

View: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=l6btzVggCi4

Imagination is the only limit
 
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skyblue said:
I’m surprised there is so little interest in Brilliant Pebbles and push to resurrect the program.

It always seemed to me like an 80’s ideas that belongs in the 2020s: clouds of small, smart cheap components, machine learning, automation, high level of decentralization. If SpaceX, Blue Origin and the crowd of other new/old space fulfill expectations to bring down launch costs dramatically, it’ll be much more affordable, and imaginable to put up the thousands of interceptor satellites needed. Miniaturization and A.I. has vastly improved, hugely so since the 80s when Brilliant Pebbles was conceived. Surely we can build much smaller, cheaper and thus populous interceptors? This has been a fashionable trend in satellite technology: SmallSats, CubeSats, Elon Musks’s humungous internet satellite constellation.


I noticed the strategic use of "if" in your scenario...

Yeah, things might be a lot cheaper in this theoretical future. But it's never going to be really cheap. Take lots of relatively cheap components and now try to integrate them all. The integration requires a lot of software effort and a lot of people looking over all of that. It's not easy. And it won't be cheap.

Plus, we don't even know if this would work. It requires a lot of spacecraft covering a lot of territory and all connected into a warning and tracking system that might not behave as advertised.

Lift tonnage at the very least is cheap enough that a private corporation can launch BP sized objects into low orbit on the reg.

Whether a Ku/Ka-band radio transceiver is cheaper than a small micro rocket with a strap-down uncooled IIR seeker or not is an open question I suppose. Given that everyone else exists between NORAD, the various BMEWS sites, PAVE PAWS, LRDR, and Fort Greely for orbital engagements, providing Delta 9 actual battle systems is somewhat trivial at this point; so SDI at least has everything in place except the actual interceptors now.
 
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I have no doubt that the KKV tech can be made even cheaper with additive manufacturing. Clementine used that tech…and I would not be surprised to find it behind the tech that allowed Delta II Mars probes that also had to be small.
It wasn't used for Mars probes.
 

Whether a Ku/Ka-band radio transceiver is cheaper than a small micro rocket with a strap-down uncooled IIR seeker or not is an open question I suppose. Given that everyone else exists between NORAD, the various BMEWS sites, PAVE PAWS, LRDR, and Fort Greely for orbital engagements, providing Delta 9 actual battle systems is somewhat trivial at this point; so SDI at least has everything in place except the actual interceptors now.
Not really and everything is not in place. It would take more ground sites and more tracking spacecraft to enable it.
 
Brilliant pebbles falls down because you only have a very limited number of pebbles in the right place at the right time.

What you need in space is an interceptor with the ability to go faster than ICBMs and with the means to destroy many at once from distance with just one interceptor. The way to do that would be reactor-pumped solid state laser array operating at as short a wavelength as possible (close to 350nm preferably for atmospheric penetration) onboard NTP-propelled heavy satellites, in a constellation of 60-120. Modern commercial SMRs can now generate 30MWe with an all-up weight of 50 tons (including fluids and gen set). With efficiencies of 76% now achievable, this could generate a 23MW laser. With the weight of the laser itself plus propellant, the overall satellite would weigh 100-150t BAE (Broad Arse Estimate). It would need to have a number of smaller 10% power laser arrays to protect the satellite itself.

That's the minimum of what you need for a space-based system, anything else is wasting time and money. It could serve a secondary role of landing enemy bombers and very short pulses being used for 'spontaneous combustion incidents' involving enemy ammunition dumps, which would be followed by much shoulder shrugging. By operating the laser in pulses, power much greater than 23MW could be achieved for very short durations but the over energy per second of charging would be less, so maybe 18-20MJ pulses lasting nanoseconds - milliseconds per second of charging.
 
Brilliant pebbles falls down because you only have a very limited number of pebbles in the right place at the right time.
Through that kinda falls down itself once you remember something.

Starlink has over 3000 satellites in the sky at the mount. Right where the Pebbles were to sit and are triple in size. And the math to properly stop the Soviets said you needed bout 10k. With 4,600 being enough to do limited strike stopping like what China or Korea can do.

The Full Pebbles shield is possible right now, just need to upgrade the designs and launch them. Will deal with far less red tape as well.

And I honestly make them bigger as well, just enough to allow them to double as a low level comm retransmit satellite for ground forces.
 
Through that kinda falls down itself once you remember something.

Starlink has over 3000 satellites in the sky at the mount. Right where the Pebbles were to sit and are triple in size. And the math to properly stop the Soviets said you needed bout 10k. With 4,600 being enough to do limited strike stopping like what China or Korea can do.

The Full Pebbles shield is possible right now, just need to upgrade the designs and launch them. Will deal with far less red tape as well.

And I honestly make them bigger as well, just enough to allow them to double as a low level comm retransmit satellite for ground forces.
Pebbles don't have that much capacity to manoeuvre to other places, and once one patch intercepts a missile of two, the rest get through. KKVs works because the missiles they're on deliver them to the correct spot, with Brilliant Pebbles you have lots of KKVs in the wrong spot and very few in range of the launch trajectories at the right time. You'd be better off saving the rockets and rocket fuel to fire them all up to the right spot at the right time.
 
A railgun might be of use to fire KKVs perhaps? Dual use cubesat-KKVs fired to celestial bodies at end of life?
 
A railgun might be of use to fire KKVs perhaps? Dual use cubesat-KKVs fired to celestial bodies at end of life?
Yes, assuming the electronics on the KKV can withstand the many thousands of g it will experience during firing, and the gun is powerful enough.
 

The Full Pebbles shield is possible right now, just need to upgrade the designs and launch them. Will deal with far less red tape as well.

And I honestly make them bigger as well, just enough to allow them to double as a low level comm retransmit satellite for ground forces.
no, it isn't. There isn't the detection, tracking, command and control systems to manage them.
 
Through that kinda falls down itself once you remember something.

Starlink has over 3000 satellites in the sky at the mount. Right where the Pebbles were to sit and are triple in size. And the math to properly stop the Soviets said you needed bout 10k. With 4,600 being enough to do limited strike stopping like what China or Korea can do.

The Full Pebbles shield is possible right now, just need to upgrade the designs and launch them. Will deal with far less red tape as well.

And I honestly make them bigger as well, just enough to allow them to double as a low level comm retransmit satellite for ground forces.
Pebbles don't have that much capacity to manoeuvre to other places, and once one patch intercepts a missile of two, the rest get through. KKVs works because the missiles they're on deliver them to the correct spot, with Brilliant Pebbles you have lots of KKVs in the wrong spot and very few in range of the launch trajectories at the right time. You'd be better off saving the rockets and rocket fuel to fire them all up to the right spot at the right time.
Yes but at the same time BPs have far fewer targets to hit since they go after missiles before they can deploy warheads/penaids, while KKVs go after the warheads themselves.
 
Yes but at the same time BPs have far fewer targets to hit since they go after missiles before they can deploy warheads/penaids, while KKVs go after the warheads themselves.
True but given the amount of rockets required to put thousands up there (4063 in the case of the SDI proposal), and the fact only a few dozen will be in the right place at the right time, you've wasted ~4000 launches. On the other hand if you spent the same money on interceptors, you'd have several thousand, so even with a 10% Pk you'd be two orders of magnitude better off. Additionally, we don't even have 10 warhead missiles anymore under the latest iteration of START, 4 max, so even that advantage is diminished. Equally, brilliant pebbles won't work on HGVs, which travel endo-atmospheric. To make space interceptors worthwhile, you need a propelled direct energy system that can hit ICBMs at launch and throughout any flight profile. It would also have dual use applications.
 
A KKV shooter is also your best bet to deal with hypersonic missiles-a second clip of flechettes.
 
Yes but at the same time BPs have far fewer targets to hit since they go after missiles before they can deploy warheads/penaids, while KKVs go after the warheads themselves.
True but given the amount of rockets required to put thousands up there (4063 in the case of the SDI proposal), and the fact only a few dozen will be in the right place at the right time, you've wasted ~4000 launches. On the other hand if you spent the same money on interceptors, you'd have several thousand, so even with a 10% Pk you'd be two orders of magnitude better off. Additionally, we don't even have 10 warhead missiles anymore under the latest iteration of START, 4 max, so even that advantage is diminished. Equally, brilliant pebbles won't work on HGVs, which travel endo-atmospheric. To make space interceptors worthwhile, you need a propelled direct energy system that can hit ICBMs at launch and throughout any flight profile. It would also have dual use applications.
Thats incorrect, under New START you can put as many warheads on a booster as you want.

Boost phase intercept is also easier, since you have a big, slow, soft, bright target without penaids, compared to trying to hit a small fast, hardened warhead amidst a cloud of penaids.
 
Thats incorrect, under New START you can put as many warheads on a booster as you want.

Boost phase intercept is also easier, since you have a big, slow, soft, bright target without penaids, compared to trying to hit a small fast, hardened warhead amidst a cloud of penaids.
True, that's new, but I don't think it changes the calculus enough to change things. Penaids are fairly easy to discriminate with modern dual-polarised radars.


Second, LRDR is “a dual-polarized, dual-range capability radar.” Marshall wouldn’t go into details, but the term “dual-polarized” is used in open literature to describe cutting-edge civilian weather radars, which are better at telling the difference between, say, rain, snow, and hail, and can even measure the size of the hailstones as they come down.

So any penaid would need to be completely identical to a warhead and hence limit the number of actual warheads carried.

That said, with the original plan of putting 4,063 pebbles into orbit, if we assume that 100 get successful intercepts, since the total deployed strategic warheads is 1,550 (and some are HGVs, so can't be stopped by pebbles), there are 476 deployed missiles, so the average number of warheads per missile is still ~3 (especially since some of the 1,550 warheads are air-launched). So you stop 300 warheads and that really is a best case scenario assuming all pebbles within range function at a Pk of 100% (as it was, none of the three pebbles tests worked). It takes either 4,063 rockets larger than GBI to put them into orbit, or less really large more expensive rockets maybe. 4,063 GBIs still beat pebbles even if only 10% hit live warheads.
 
Shotshells rip up decoys-a hit on something harder is its own tell-that is your KKV target. Shot-cloud as pinger.
 
Lasers as discriminators. That said if these dual polarisation radars are capable of telling rain from hail stones, then clearly density is in some way determinable.
 
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Whether a Ku/Ka-band radio transceiver is cheaper than a small micro rocket with a strap-down uncooled IIR seeker or not is an open question I suppose. Given that everyone else exists between NORAD, the various BMEWS sites, PAVE PAWS, LRDR, and Fort Greely for orbital engagements, providing Delta 9 actual battle systems is somewhat trivial at this point; so SDI at least has everything in place except the actual interceptors now.
Not really and everything is not in place. It would take more ground sites and more tracking spacecraft to enable it.

What is missing? The only thing I'm aware of that is lacking from GPALS, besides the Pebbles, is the Brilliant Eyes/SBIRS-LO targeting system. The latter at least seems somewhat redundant with modern FLIRs anyway, unless BE's purpose was to provide visual-EO tracking of the interceptors themselves? Is it not possible for a high powered radar like the recently upgraded PAVE PAWS or LRDR to do this?

It may not get boost-phase intercept on the far side of the planet, but it can still credibly add to midcourse and orbital intercept layers.
 
True but given the amount of rockets required to put thousands up there (4063 in the case of the SDI proposal), and the fact only a few dozen will be in the right place at the right time, you've wasted ~4000 launches.

You would launch multiple interceptors per launch, just as the constellation operators launch 50 satellites per. A lot of the work to make the system feasible was about cutting the mass per interceptor, to reduce launch costs. The actual numbers are afaik still very classified, but the wet mass of an interceptor was definitely expected to be less than a ton. On Starship, that would mean >100 interceptors per launch. And that was with 90's sensors and computers, I'd bet that they could be made even smaller today.

And with a good trajectory planning, a lot more than a few dozen will be in place to intercept. The work from the 90s estimated that 10% of the entire constellation would be able to make boost-phase intercepts against a mass launch. Another 5% or so would be able to try to make (much lower Pk) late-stage intercepts when any surviving missiles come down.

Not that I'm saying that brilliant pebbles are necessarily a good idea, just that the common arguments against them are no longer relevant. Even without Starship, with F9 routinely launching 17t in reusable mode to mid-inclination orbit, it's now fair to say that the launch costs are irrelevant. Everything else in the program is going to cost so much more, that if you do it you can hide the launch costs in the rounding errors.
 
You could probably make them as small/light as an SM-3 3rd stage with it's KKV (or even smaller). Starship could take them to orbit by the hundreds. Maybe thousands depending on how much you brought the weight down.
 
You would launch multiple interceptors per launch, just as the constellation operators launch 50 satellites per. A lot of the work to make the system feasible was about cutting the mass per interceptor, to reduce launch costs. The actual numbers are afaik still very classified, but the wet mass of an interceptor was definitely expected to be less than a ton. On Starship, that would mean >100 interceptors per launch. And that was with 90's sensors and computers, I'd bet that they could be made even smaller today.

And with a good trajectory planning, a lot more than a few dozen will be in place to intercept. The work from the 90s estimated that 10% of the entire constellation would be able to make boost-phase intercepts against a mass launch. Another 5% or so would be able to try to make (much lower Pk) late-stage intercepts when any surviving missiles come down.

Not that I'm saying that brilliant pebbles are necessarily a good idea, just that the common arguments against them are no longer relevant. Even without Starship, with F9 routinely launching 17t in reusable mode to mid-inclination orbit, it's now fair to say that the launch costs are irrelevant. Everything else in the program is going to cost so much more, that if you do it you can hide the launch costs in the rounding errors.
As a counter you could have a multi-KKV interceptor though.

I'd prefer 60 NTP satellites with reactor pumped 35MW FEL lasers operating at 351nm wavelength* with pulse or CW modes though. 30% efficiency is now possible with FEL and USNC reckon about 10t for a 50MWth (25MWe) reactor, so 50t gets you a 125MW reactor, adding the laser and propellant should give around 150t all up.

This is important because it can penetrate down to surface level which massively increases boost-phase intercepts and makes it usable for other things (such as 'smoking-related incidents').
 
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