After years of testing a lab model at the Navy surface warfare center in Dahlgren, Virginia, the railgun — a gun without moving parts that fires a round through a big burst of electricity — is finally moving into a prototype phase. Next week, BAE System’s version of the railgun should arrive at Dahlgren for tests, followed in April by General Atomics’ version.
Meanwhile, Raytheon is developing the central nervous system of the railgun — the battery package that stores and then blasts the energy to send a bullet through the barrel. A shipboard demonstration should be ready, tentatively, by 2019.
That came very close not to happening at all. In June, the Senate Armed Services Committee put the railgun on the chopping block. That was barely six months after the railgun broke a world record at Dahlgren, firing a 23-pound bullet at Mach 8 speeds thanks to 33 megajoules of energy. But “the committee felt the technical challenges to developing and fielding the weapon would be daunting,” staff director Richard DeBobes told Danger Room back then, “particularly the power required and the barrel of the gun having limited life.”
But that was before the railgun’s powerful friends on the Hill fought back. “The other three committees [overseeing the military] decided the program was worth continuing,” reflects Nevin Carr, a retired two-star admiral who stepped down in the fall from running the futuristic Office of Naval Research. The railgun might still get its funding reduced when the defense budget is released on Monday. But the budget bill that emerged in December let the project live — so long as the Navy gives Congress a report answering more detailed questions more often about the railgun program.
“Democracy is a conversation,” says Carr, a railgun die-hard.
Except the committee’s concerns weren’t exactly baseless. Gun barrels typically wear out after releasing 500 to 600 rounds. But it’s unclear how a barrel that pushes energy through holds up. Carr says that the Navy has fired “over 100 rounds” through a test barrel so far.
But there are at least three other big technical challenges ahead for the railgun.
First, the gun is supposed to sit aboard an Arleigh Burke-class Destroyer. But different destroyers, at different ages, generate different amounts of power — or, more precisely, react differently when diverting generator power to, say, a railgun. Carr says that generating more than 26 megajoules for a shot — which should send a bullet careening across hundreds of miles of ocean in mere minutes — shouldn’t be a problem, but railgun tests are already running at 33 megajoules. “You may have to add additional power” to the ship, Carr says. That costs money.
Second, the railgun currently fires a dumb old lump of metal. And the military is three decades deep into smart, electronically enhanced munitions, to minimize civilian casualties. But a hypersonic electric burst is going to burn electronics to a melty mess of metal. Carr says that in a “couple of years” the Navy will “coalesce” a variety of immature efforts to build temperature-resistant guidance systems for the railgun’s bullet.
Finally, there’s the repetition rate — how many shots the railgun can fire how quickly. You can’t exactly put an electric gun on automatic. The Navy wants the railgun to fire six to 10 rounds a minute, but it’s not clear yet that the gun can do that. “One [round] a minute, that’s less useful,” Carr says.
Then there’s the budget pressure. Should any of these technical challenges prove to be protracted, the knives might come out for the railgun once again, now that austerity is the watchword at the Pentagon.
But in fact, the Navy is pushing ahead with several of its most important high-tech projects.
There’s the X-47B, the killer drone and UFO lookalike the Navy wants to take off and land from an aircraft carrier by 2018. And earlier this week, the Navy’s top officer for unmanned systems told reporters to expect an upgrade to its robot helicopter, the Fire Scout in 2012; as well as the first-ever flight of a spy drone called the Broad Area Maritime Surveillance system. (BAMS, preferably pronounced like Chef Emeril Lagasse would say it.)
That raised eyebrows. Mere months ago, Adm. Jonathan Greenert, the Navy’s chief, mused that “there are some technology investments that we have out there in future systems that have too high a risk technologically, that I’m not certain — in fact, that I know — we’re going to have to defer.”
But it’s looking more like the seafarers have largely protected their high-tech priorities from the austerity-minded Congress — even if some of those systems might get a fiscal shave and a haircut. That, at least, was Greenert’s message when Danger Room briefly interviewed him on Saturday aboard the U.S.S. Wasp.
“I can’t give numbers yet,” said Adm. Jonathan Greenert, “but we stayed the course on science and technology.”
