...a laser test facility at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in Livermore, Calif. -- turned on its 192 laser beams for a scant instant the day after the nation celebrated its birth, unleashing a record-setting 1.85-megajoule blast into a target chamber that delivered more than 500 trillion watts of power....In the historic test, NIF's 192 lasers fired within a few trillionths of a second of each other onto a 2-millimeter-diameter target. Beyond its sheer power, the beam-to-beam uniformity was within 1 percent, making NIF not only the highest energy laser of its kind but the most precise and reproducible.
How does that compare with microwave beams being proposed for the use of launching spacecraft?
According to a previous post, the amount of energy needed for the MAB should be less than .01% of this, but it will need to be supplied over a much longer time period. It takes about 8 minutes or so to reach orbit. The spacecraft won't need any energy to get back, if I am correct.
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