The Hook. In today's IT digest, an almost ritualistic headline flashed by: "The Hyperboloid of Engineer Garin: Gas-Dynamic Lasers." At first I thought it was just another romanticization of Tolstoy's old sci-fi — you know, a 1927 novel about a copper-haired engineer who cuts ships on the horizon with two hyperbolic mirrors. Canonical Soviet science fiction, the 1965 film adaptation, another in 1973, nothing new. But then I started unraveling what kind of lasers were mentioned there — and it turned out that behind the dry headline lay one of the most elegant and little-known stories of the 20th century: how a fictional weapon by a Russian writer inspired a Nobel laureate thirty-five years later, and a year after that a Soviet theorist gave it physical justification, and four years later an American engineer assembled the first working prototype in metal. And this prototype turned out to be so powerful and so cheap per kilowatt that in the 1970s–80s it supported three competing strategic weapons programs: the Soviet "Skif" (future "Polyus"), the American Airborne Laser Lab program, and the ground-based mobile "THEL". And then the GDL — gas-dynamic laser — quietly left the stage, yielding to the chemical oxygen-iodine laser, and now no one remembers it except Cold War historians and a couple dozen physicists. This is a story about how prophecy becomes physics, physics becomes weaponry, and weaponry becomes trash on the shelves of Pentagon and Balaban museums.
The topic didn't repeat previously covered longforms (checked the archive of 30 files — no mentions of "gas-dynamic laser," GDL, CO2-N2-He, hyperboloid as an actual device), and it organically continues the IT digest but takes it to a completely different plane — where physics intersects with military history, science fiction, and politics.
The Investigation.
Let's start with the most incredible fact, which by itself deserves a separate headline.
Alexei Nikolaevich Tolstoy wrote "The Hyperboloid of Engineer Garin" in 1926–1927. The protagonist, former engineer Garin, invents a device that gathers light into a parallel beam through two hyperbolic mirrors and uses this beam as a weapon — cutting wires, punching through walls, destroying a warship on the horizon. The novel was written thirty-five years before the first laser appeared and thirty-nine years before the first gas-dynamic laser. Tolstoy had neither Townes's maser (1954), nor Maiman's laser (1960), nor the physics of population inversion, nor even the word "coherence" in common usage. There was only a trope from early 1900s science fiction — the "death ray," a classic cliché popularized by H.G. Wells in "The War of the Worlds" (1898).
But Tolstoy went beyond Wells. His device is emphatically engineering-focused: the novel describes specific parameters, mirror diameters, light source, explanation through hyperboloid geometry. This isn't magic, not a philosopher's stone, not "Nikola Tesla's radiation energy" — this is a machine that could (in the text) be built.
And here's the killer fact: Charles Townes, the 1964 Nobel laureate, one of the fathers of quantum electronics, confirmed in 2015 (in Annie Jacobsen's book "The Pentagon's Brain," p. 207) that his invention was inspired by precisely this novel. This isn't a footnote in an essay, not a legend, not self-promotion — this is a documented position by one of the most conservative physicists of the 20th century, who kept silent about this source of inspiration for thirty years until asked. Townes, remember, invented the maser in 1954, and in 1958 together with Arthur Schawlow published the theory of the laser. Two years later Maiman built the first ruby laser. Six years after that the gas-dynamic laser appeared, and in its architecture — supersonic expansion, non-equilibrium relaxation, separation of upper and lower vibrational states — it turned out to be surprisingly similar to what Tolstoy described in words forty years before Basov.
Of course, Townes didn't copy Tolstoy. He used the novel as a metaphor for a concentrated beam — but the very fact that a pre-war Soviet writer formulated the image of a weapon that Nobel physics responded to a generation later deserves to be told. And by the way: Professor Georgy Slyusarev, an optics specialist, in his 1944 book "On the Possible and Impossible in Optics" thoroughly explained why exactly Garin's hyperboloid was physically impossible — at that time it was the final verdict. Twenty years later the verdict ceased to be final.
Here begins the actual physics — and it's simpler than it seems if you drop the math apparatus.
Usually in lasers population inversion is achieved by electrical pumping (as in helium-neon) or optical pumping (as in ruby). Academician Nikolai Basov and his colleague Anatoly Oraevsky in 1962 proposed a completely different mechanism — thermal pumping through ultra-fast cooling of gas during adiabatic expansion.
The idea is elegant to the point of nausea (in a good sense). Take a mixture of CO₂ + N₂ + He (carbon dioxide, nitrogen, helium). Heat to 1500–2000 K. Run through a supersonic Laval nozzle. Pressure drops tens of times, temperature in a few microseconds drops to 200–300 K. But molecules of different vibrational states relax at different rates. The lower vibrational state of CO₂ (mode 100) "manages" to release energy during collisions in the time it takes to pass through the nozzle. The upper (mode 001) doesn't manage, its relaxation time is an order of magnitude longer. Population inversion arises without any pumping at all — only due to the difference in relaxation times and supersonic cooling.
This is exactly what happens in a rocket engine nozzle — where aerodynamic engineers spend their whole lives trying to make the flow equilibrium (for maximum specific impulse), the GDL designer makes the flow maximally non-equilibrium (to generate laser radiation). The authors of the Defense Review 2003 overview quite rightly noted: the gas-dynamic laser is a cousin of the rocket engine. Same physics, same nozzles, same flow regimes — and opposite goals.
The key feature of GDL — it produces continuous wave emission with power that was simply unattainable by other lasers of those years. Efficiency — up to 30%, which for lasers is incredibly high. Today we're used to lasers being low-power devices that cut DVDs and read barcodes. But GDL is a power plant in a state of emission. In a good sense — a rocket engine that instead of thrust gives a beam.
In 1966 at Avco Everett Research Laboratory (Everett, Massachusetts), engineer Edward (Edward T. "Ed") Gerry under the direction of Arthur Kantrowitz built the first working gas-dynamic laser. It was a carbon dioxide (CO₂) installation with electrical heating of the working mixture, accelerating it through an array of supersonic nozzles. Power — 135 kW continuous emission. In 1966. In a laboratory. This was three orders of magnitude more than any laser existing at that time.
135 kW, to understand the scale: 10,000 times more than a typical laser pointer. This power is enough to burn through a finger-thick steel plate in a second. You could melt a crucible of tungsten. You could cut wood at a distance of hundreds of meters. You could blind a fighter pilot dozens of kilometers away. You could — and this was the main military task — shoot down missiles.
In 1968–1970 this work was classified. To this day, according to historian Carlo Kopp, there is extremely little open data on many GDL developments of the 1970s. But what we know from declassified reports and memoirs is a race between two superpowers for the most powerful mobile laser.
The U.S. Air Force in 1976 launched the Airborne Laser Laboratory (ALL) program based on the Boeing NKC-135A (military version of the good old Stratotanker). On board was a CO₂ gas-dynamic laser with 380 kW power at the optical system output (456 kW optical power in the chamber before losses, 8-second continuous burn). Task: study whether it's possible to shoot down missiles and drones from the air, plus work out adaptive optics technology, targeting, and cooling systems.
From 1977 to 1987 the program shot down five AIM-9 missiles and one BQM-34A Firebee drone in a series of test launches. This was the first combat use of a combat laser in history against real targets. ALL proved that laser weapons are possible at all — not on paper, not in PowerPoint, but in the stratosphere over White Sands, where the target falls down in a cloud of plasma.
The program was closed in 1987 as "not meeting the requirements of full-fledged air defense/missile defense" — but served as the foundation for the next big program YAL-1A Airborne Laser Testbed (2002–2012, $5 billion), which already used a chemical oxygen-iodine laser (COIL) — a direct heir to GDL. YAL-1A in 2010 successfully shot down a ballistic missile in the boost phase — for the first time in history from an aircraft. And then this program was also closed: expensive, unreliable, impractical.
In the USSR a parallel program was underway, and it was at least as ambitious.
In 1975 NPO Almaz (Moscow) began development of the carbon dioxide CO₂ laser "Ladoga" for an airborne platform based on the Il-76MD. The program was named "Dreif" (Drift) — "drifting." Task: shoot down high-altitude reconnaissance balloons that from 1956 had been drifting through Soviet airspace at altitudes of 36,000–46,000 feet (11–14 km), launched by Western intelligence services. Some of them penetrated 1,200 miles (1,930 km) into Soviet territory. According to Russian sources, from 1956 to 1977 4,112 balloons were recorded, of which 793 were shot down by fighters. Average expenditure of ammunition per balloon — 1.4 missiles, 26 unguided rockets, 112 cannon shells. This is insanely expensive for what is essentially an air balloon.
"Dreif" was supposed to shoot at balloons with a directed laser beam. Beriev Design Bureau in Taganrog converted the Il-76MD into the A-60 carrier with a laser turret in the cargo bay and a power unit on the fuselage. Range — 25 miles (40 km), estimated continuous firing time — 50 seconds (in reality — 11 seconds, which showed real thermal limitations).
April 27, 1984 A-60, flying at altitude 32,800 feet, damaged a balloon over the Volga balloon testing center, 430 miles southeast of Moscow. This is the first documented combat use of Soviet laser weapons in history.
The program developed in parallel with the most grandiose Soviet space venture — the orbital laser station "Skif," also known as "Polyus," also known as "Mir-2" (depending on who and when called it).
This is the climax of the story, and it's told so well in The Space Review of June 5, 2023 and in Wired of May 16, 2013 that I simply must present it concisely.
In 1976 NPO Energia (Korolev's successors) began studying two concepts of anti-satellite weapons: "Skif" — an orbital laser station for destroying low-orbit U.S. satellites, and "Kaskad" — a missile system for high-altitude targets. After Reagan's speech on March 23, 1983 about the Strategic Defense Initiative (aka SDI, aka "Star Wars"), Soviet leadership allocated funds. By January 1986 70+ enterprises of the Soviet space industry were working on "Skif."
The "Skif" laser is that very CO₂ gas-dynamic laser with about a megawatt of power, with two turbogenerators of 1.2 MW each, developed by NPO Astrophysics with participation of KMZ Soyuz. The spacecraft Skif-D — a monster 40 meters long, 4 meters in diameter, 95 tons mass (heavier than Skylab). Assembled from pieces of "Buran," the canceled military station "Almaz" and the TKS functional block. For its launch there wasn't enough power in "Proton" — they had to use the new "Energia", designed for "Buran."
In parallel they prepared a simplified demonstration version Skif-DM (maket — mockup, dummy), which was supposed to test gas systems, targeting system and control block — but without the main laser. Launch of "Skif-DM" was planned for fall 1986, but was postponed. By January 1987 Gorbachev and his allies in the Politburo, frightened by costs and not wanting to give Americans a propaganda opportunity, imposed strict restrictions on the mission: gas venting canceled, targeting tests — canceled. At Baikonur cosmodrome engineers painted two names on the hull: "Polyus" (for the public) and "Mir-2" (the name of the supposed future peaceful station). "Mir" in Russian means "peace", but in this case it was either an advertising trick, or black irony, or both.
May 15, 1987, 9:30 PM Moscow time, "Energia" launched from Baikonur for the first time. The rocket performed perfectly. Skif-DM separated, began rotating 180° so that the functional block engines would be at the bottom and could put it into orbit. The rotation didn't stop at 180° — the block flipped twice and froze nose-down toward Earth. Engines fired. Skif-DM entered the atmosphere and burned up over the northern Pacific Ocean.
The culprit was one line of code — a tiny error in the rotation program that was missed in the rush, because otherwise they wouldn't make it for Gorbachev's visit to Baikonur on May 12, 1987.
The U.S. launched reconnaissance, saw in orbit (more precisely, didn't see — saw the rapid death) a Soviet military vehicle. TASS reported the loss of a "satellite mockup." A few months later the "Skif" program was closed. Equipment — to the scrapheap. Hundreds of engineers who worked around the clock received neither bonuses nor thanks — some were demoted or removed from duties.
By the way, there's a conspiracy hypothesis: part of Skif-D equipment went into the "Zarya" module (FGB) of the International Space Station — the functional cargo block that supplied power and provided station control. "Zarya" was delivered on time and within budget — the only ISS module with such a characteristic. Coincidence? Possibly. But structurally "Zarya" uses the same TKS functional block as Skif-D.
GDL in its original CO₂ version quietly went into the past. It was replaced by:
But the GDL principle itself — thermal pumping, supersonic expansion, non-equilibrium relaxation — didn't die. In 2020 a group from Japan (see IOPscience 2020) published work on a gas-dynamic laser based on an aircraft engine: a hybrid system where the combustion chamber of a turbojet engine serves as a source of heated mixture. In 2015 in AIAA Journal a paper came out on hypersonic gasdynamic laser system for laser thermal propulsion — an engine concept in which the laser heats the working fluid and ejects it through a nozzle. So the idea returned to space after 50 years — but now not as a weapon, but as a way to move satellites between orbits.
In 2009 A-60/1A2 (the second machine of the "Dreif" program — the first burned in 1988) conducted a unique experiment: a reflected signal from the Japanese geodetic satellite Ajisai at altitude 932 miles (1,500 km) was detected from the ground. Russia officially reported that it "blinded an infrared sensor on the satellite" (though officially unconfirmed). 30 years from the first flight to the first space experiment. This, mind you, is longer than the average life cycle of one scientific-technical program.
I love looped stories. This one is looped four times.
Loop one — literature. In 1926–1927 émigré Alexei Tolstoy, sitting in a Parisian apartment and missing his homeland, writes a novel about a mad engineer who cuts the world with hyperbolic mirrors. The novel inspires a Nobel laureate — documented fact. Townes 27 years later creates the physics on which all modern lasers stand, including GDL.
Loop two — theory. In 1962 Basov and Oraevsky give mathematical justification for what Tolstoy invented in words. None of them references "The Hyperboloid" — Soviet physics is cautious with such parallels — but Basov himself later writes that he worked on "thermal excitation of lasers" from 1961, and his first theoretical sketches appear simultaneously with American works, but independently.
Loop three — engineering. In 1966 Edward Gerry at Avco Everett assembles what Tolstoy described in 1927 — only instead of hyperbolic mirrors uses a supersonic nozzle and non-equilibrium CO₂ kinetics. 135 kW continuous power. A machine that could have shot down ballistic missiles decades later, but didn't shoot down a single one.
Loop four — geopolitics. The "Skif" program, direct heir of the 1966 laboratory GDL, passes through all milestones of the Cold War — Reagan's speech, SDI program, "Star Wars," panic of Soviet generals, perestroika, collapse of the Union. The laser that began as a Russian writer's fantasy ends as a burned satellite over the Pacific Ocean on May 15, 1987, four years before the USSR collapse. And no one — neither Townes, nor Gerry, nor Basov, nor the engineers from Baikonur — receives any awards or glory for it. The gas-dynamic laser worked — but didn't work out.
The gas-dynamic laser is a story of invisible triumph. A device born from science fiction, becoming physics, becoming engineering, becoming a political project, fulfilled all technical tasks set before it — and still lost. Not because it worked poorly, but because for a weapon you need not only physics, but also infrastructure, and political will, and budget, and pragmatism. The YAL-1A program is closed, A-60 burned, Skif-DM burned. Working GDLs today are, at best, 3–4 laboratory stands in the USA, Russia, and Japan, plus a couple of prototypes within laser thermal propulsion programs. And not a single commercial product.
What hooked me most strongly — the scale of expenditures with the scale of failure. By various estimates, $5+ billion just on YAL-1A, another $2–3 billion on the 1976–1987 ALL program, several billion rubles on "Skif" and A-60, plus Soviet expenditures on "Astrophysics" and "Almaz" that were never published. This is comparable to NASA's annual budget for the lunar program. And all this — for a machine that could have worked, but which no one let finish the job.
The funniest part: Alexei Tolstoy in 1927 made an almost exact prediction. His engineer Garin decides it's better to sell the technology to one country rather than let it spread — and dies as a result of betrayal. In reality GDL spread — in America, and in the Union, and in England, and in Japan, and in Israel, and in China. Everyone wanted their own Garin, and in the end no one got anything — except the knowledge that GDL works.
And the novel, by the way, is still published. Two films, the band "Kino" in 1981–1982 was called "Garin and the Hyperboloids" (until renamed at the request of one of the participants), Estonian punk band Vennaskond released the album "Insener Garini Hüperboloid." Literature outlived physics, as usual.
And one more detail I couldn't help but notice. In 2013 Wired asks: "What would have happened if Skif-DM had reached orbit?" This is a rhetorical question — but it's also literal. If not for one line of code on May 15, 1987, there would have been a Soviet combat laser in space in 1987. What would have happened next — a separate counterfactual story we, fortunately, didn't learn.