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GOP
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Which department is more unprofessional, more prone to slapdash actions, more reckless right now: Defense or Homeland Security? It's a tough call, though DHS put in yet another claim to the title this weekend (although they were enabled by DoD, so both get at least some of the credit).
What happened, in brief, is that some geniuses in the employ of DHS, who were working out of Fort Bliss in Texas, thought they sighted a Mexican drone headed in their direction. So, they got out the laser that they had borrowed from the DoD in order to shoot it down. As it turns out, the "drone" was actually just a balloon (shades of "99 Luftballons"). Apparently, the shot was "successful," and that balloon will never threaten anyone again. However, the laser shot forced the closure of airspace around El Paso Airport.
This was... bad. We are not experts in lasers, but we have a reader who is, and can explain why it's bad. Take it away, R.R. in Pasadena, CA:
I work with lasers in adaptive optics, where we use a laser to create a spot in the sky as a reference source, so I know what it takes to fire a laser into the sky in the U.S. The events in El Paso this week were a shock, because the use of lasers fired into the sky is highly regulated. Even the military has to get clearance from the FAA and the Joint Space Operations Center (JSpOC, which was in the Air Force but is now in the Space Force) to fire a laser into the sky. The more powerful the laser, the more restrictions that are in place. I suspect those get relaxed in an emergency (like an invasion), but to this point there has not been news of any such emergencies released publicly.
To fire a laser the FAA has to clear it for operations. We use an ultraviolet laser that cannot damage a plane or even hurt a helicopter flying over the dome (pilots can't see it and it isn't powerful enough to cause damage), so we're fully cleared to operate at all times. If it's a visible, infrared, or more powerful laser, the FAA goes through a process of approval, and you have to show them that the laser can't harm aircraft, or you have to have a system in place to avoid hitting aircraft. There's a system in use in astronomy that avoids aircraft using the transponder information transmitted by aircraft... if they fly into range the laser has to shutter. I believe the FAA requires aircraft to use transponders in the area around telescopes using this system. They used to require people outside watching the sky for aircraft in order to operate the laser. We avoided that by using UV (we do robotic ops), while some observatories without the transponder system still work that way. The military tightly controls their ops with humans involved, so they probably have someone dedicated to watching for aircraft or a similar radar system, and they work in military areas where there shouldn't be any civilian airplanes close by.
Satellites are another thing, it's possible to hit a satellite in space with a laser, with the militaries of the U.S., Russia, and China testing the capability. It's a State Department-level event if you hit another nation's satellite, even if you don't cause any damage (our laser won't, but some big astronomy lasers might, and the military lasers are much more powerful). The U.S. has a system where you submit what you want to look at beforehand, and JSpOC sends back a list of times that you can fire the laser while avoiding satellites. They do this for a variety of targets (stars, satellites, and more esoteric things), and they also will close you down if there's an event (like a secret rocket launch) that they didn't know about when they sent your files.
With all this in mind, the idea of some yahoos in Texas randomly firing their lasers (which could damage stuff by design) without notice, scaring the bejesus out of the FAA and causing a shutdown of the El Paso airport, is insane. They should not have been firing willy-nilly, they should not have been firing in a way that might have struck aircraft in the area, and they endangered a lot of things by lighting up the sky to shoot at a floating object (which turned out to be a balloon), which had a moving position that the laser may not have had in its database (which would have shown where it can fire into space at that time). Someone flipped out and fired the laser at something drifting at low altitude across the border, which was an excessive response to a minor target. It's very possible someone just decided to try out a new toy and took this as their chance to shoot something up. I really can't stress enough how dangerous this was, especially if those lasers were able to damage aircraft or flash-blind pilots, as people could have died as a result of what happened.
I guess the news that it was Customs and Border Protection that did it shouldn't be surprising; recent events have shown that they don't believe that the rules or law apply to them. Hopefully the military has clamped down on their ability to do this kind of thing, because it's already challenging to operate lasers and anything that puts more pressure on us to avoid events like this just adds to the difficulties.
Thanks, R.R.
We really don't have much to add, except that we look forward to the day that the federal bureaucracy is no longer led by a bunch of incompetent bootlickers cosplaying as Ernst Stavro Blofeld. (Z)