What you see above is a laser beam striking and tracking a point at the front of a rocket to destroy it mid-flight. The beam is from Lockheed Martin’s newly developed ADAM high energy laser (HEL) system which is taking out that rocket from a range of 1.5 km, as you will see in the video below.

The rocket is completely destroyed as you can see in the image:

ADAM or Area Defense Anti-Munitions is a system capable of nullifying attacks from unmanned aerial vehicles or rocket attacks from the ground. It can track short-range target from a distance of 5 km to destroy it when it’s in a range of up to 2 km. It could be very useful for protecting assets like military bases near the battlefield.

The video shows an ADAM prototype destroying a “Qassam-like” rocket. You will be able to clearly see the laser striking and tracking the rocket to eventually take it out.

It’s, of course, being developed to protect humans and military stuff from missiles, but why should they fire a rocket in the first place. It’s sad to remember that this will deal mostly with war. Why don’t they develop and keep this tech for some good use in the future, like helping NASA and Harry Stamper to take care of an extra-terrestrial threat.

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Near the end of 2010 NASA chose three companies who would develop three new aircrafts for the year 2025, complying with NASA’s guidelines for the futuristic planes. Now, Boeing, Lockheed Martin and Northrop Grumman have come up with three completely different artist renderings of their proposed aircrafts which are quite inspiring.

NASA’s parameters for the aircraft include less noise, better mileage and cleaner exhaust while flying on a more modernized air traffic system. In addition, the crafts have to fly at 85 per cent of the speed of sound, cover a range of approximately 7,000 miles and carry between 50,000 and 100,000 lbs of passengers or cargo.

“For the rest of this year, each team will be exploring, testing, simulating, keeping and discarding innovations and technologies to make their design a winner,” writes NASA. “Each aircraft…requires a complex dance of tradeoffs between all of the new advanced technologies that will be on these vehicles.”

And there doesn’t seem to be a common idea between the three companies as to how it can meet the requirements. Boeing’s military-style craft looks as if its payload may include bombs, while Northrop Grumman’s concept resembles some sort of giant pontoon plane/jumbo jet hybrid. On the complete opposite end of the spectrum, Lockheed Martin’s plane isn’t too far off from what’s already standard for passenger crafts, aside from the single propeller on the tail and the wing extensions that double back to it.

The concepts’ designs will undergo several changes throughout the year, NASA says, and by production, may not even remotely resemble the originals. But its nice to see where things started.

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