This film shows TRW’s Capistrano Test Site, a remote, 2,700 acre R&D complex in the hills at the edge of Camp Pendleton, operated by TRW’s Defense Space Systems Group. San Juan Capistrano has been the primary test site for high energy laser devices for over three decades. It was built up dramatically to support space-based “Star Wars” weapons systems / SDI in the 1980’s, and is still at work on advanced and powerful chemical laser systems, as well as radar and propulsion systems.
Also tested at the CTS, various laser beam weapons, rocket engines, a lunar descent engine turned into a natural gas burning utility for power generation, innovative chemical processes to help increase use of clean coal, power generation and chemical laser systems, and more.
Some of the systems developed at the site include:
NACL – Navy/ARPA Advanced Chemical Laser – a 400 Kilowatt 10.6
micron carbon dioxide gas dynamic laser installed at the TRW San
Juan Capistrano test facility succeeded in destroying target drones
in the mid 1970’s, and was superseded by MIRACL in the early
1980’s.
MIRACL – Mid Infrared Advanced Chemical Laser – a 2.2 Megawatt 3.8 micron infrared deuterium fluoride chemical laser built for the
Navy by TRW. Tested at the company’s San Juan Capistrano facility, MIRACL destroyed several airborne targets. But MIRACL suffered from very poor beam quality, about a factor of 70 worse than the diffraction limit. In conjunction with the 1.8 meter Sea Light Beam Director, MIRACL was moved in 1987 to the White Sands test range for laser lethality testing.
ALPHA – This IR chemical laser device was completed in 1986 with
testing initiated in 1987 at the TRW facility at San Juan
Capistrano, to demonstrate a performance goal of 2 Megawatts power with beam quality necessary to establish the feasibility of
chemical lasers for BMD applications. The Clinton Administration is financing the development and demonstration of the major subsystems of Alpha, which is intended to lead to an operational constellation of a half-dozen orbital battle-stations by the year 2006.
TRW Inc. was an American corporation involved in a variety of businesses, mainly aerospace, automotive, and credit reporting. It was a pioneer in multiple fields including electronic components, integrated circuits, computers, software and systems engineering. TRW built many spacecraft, including Pioneer 1, Pioneer 10, and several space-based observatories. It was #57 on the Fortune 500 list, and had 122,258 employees
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