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Nearly a decade ago, James Ionson and the Strategic Defense Initiative
made a perfect match. SDI was an upstart Pentagon initiative brimming with
cash and promising to turn established military strategy on its head. Ionson
was an award-winning astrophysicist at NASA, 32 years old, and a conservative
who still cheerfully calls himself ‘brash and arrogant’ and says he has
an ego ‘the size of the moon’.

Ionson convinced James Abrahamson, the air force general in charge of
SDI, to set up an Innovative Science and Technology (IST) programme in 1985
and put him in charge. This programme became the basic research arm of SDI,
sponsoring research in risky fields such as computers that might run on
light instead of electricity, superconductivity and gamma-ray lasers. He
passed on nearly $100 million each year to researchers in universities
and high-technology businesses. Abrahamson also put Ionson in charge of
promoting commercial uses for SDI technology, because the IST programme
seemed most likely to generate civilian spin-offs. Reports from the IST
office claimed that SDI research was creating stronger and lighter materials
for the construction industry, lasers to help diagnose diseases, more powerful
computers and more efficient refrigerators.

For the supporters of SDI, these reports were proof that SDI, even if
it never produced an antimissile shield, was fuelling a technological surge
that would carry the American economy forward into a prosperous future.
In 1986 Ronald Reagan told a cheering crowd in the Rocky Mountain town of
Colorado Springs that ‘our Strategic Defense Initiative could open up whole
new fields of technology and industry, providing jobs for thousands right
here in Colorado’. One consulting firm, the Business Communications Company
in Stamford, Connecticut, estimated that commercial sales from technologies
spun off from SDI could reach $20 trillion. And in 1986, The New York
Times trumpeted from the cover of its Sunday magazine: ‘The controversial
defense system is yielding technologies that seem sure to change the world.’

Falling in love with technology

Ionson himself tried to cash in on the apparent bonanza he was helping
to create. In 1988, he left the IST office and started up a company called
JDC Enterprises to buy technologies from inventors and university researchers
and sell them to large corporate customers. ‘In some cases, these technologies
are so close to the commercial marketplace, the people who have invented
them don’t even realise it. You can get a quick turnaround on your investment,’
he said at the time.

But the quick profits never materialised. JDC Enterprises had trouble
finding customers for all this innovative technology, and closed its doors
in 1991 when Ionson left to become vice-president for research at the Polaroid
Corporation in Massachusetts. He now confesses that ‘there was a lot of
hype’ concerning commercial prospects for such technologies as superconducting
materials or artificial diamonds. ‘We fell in love with the technology,
and didn’t care if it was laser potato peelers or belly-button jelly. It
was new. It was exciting and it felt good,’ he says. ‘It wasn’t until I
left the government that it dawned on me that pushing laser potato peelers
because they’re new and innovative isn’t necessarily going to make a profit.’

Ionson still believes the IST programme was a good idea, because it
‘pumped at least a billion dollars into the technological infrastructure
of this country’. But he is scornful of reports from his old office describing
scores of commercial spin-offs from SDI. Many of the claims, he says, are
‘garbage’. Even if a few successful companies are realising commercial profits
with technologies developed with SDI money: ‘It’s little bits of this and
that. One little bit may look pretty good, but if you look at the whole
picture, not much is happening.’

The great bulk of SDI funding, which adds up to $32 billion so far,
has been ploughed into military devices of little relevance to the civilian
marketplace. Most of this money has gone no further than the familiar cast
of large companies that build military equipment for the Pentagon. The three
largest SDI contractors – the military divisions of Lockheed, Boeing and
TRW – have each acquired SDI contracts worth more than the total funding
so far for the IST programme.

In the early years of SDI, huge sums were spent on ‘directed-energy
weapons’ such as lasers and particle accelerators. These beam weapons created
much of the special aura surrounding Star Wars in the public imagination:
the programme seemed to be on the verge of turning science fiction into
reality, first in weaponry and then in the technology of daily life.

The brightest star in this constellation of technologies was the free-electron
laser, an innovation that emerged from Stanford University in the late 1970s.
As its name implies, it uses a high-energy beam of electrons to generate
laser light. Unlike other lasers, it is possible to ‘tune’ the beam to set
its wavelength to the optimum for travelling through various atmospheric
conditions. The Pentagon had been supporting research on the free-electron
laser for several years before SDI came along. But with SDI, tens of millions
of dollars each year suddenly poured into these research programmes. Now,
after spending just over $1 billion on the free-electron laser, SDI has
decided the technical hurdles are too high (see ‘Blinded by the light’,
this issue) and it wants to shut down the programme.

What survives is a research programme dedicated to exploring medical
uses of the free-electron laser. In the mid-1980s, biomedical researchers
realised that a tunable laser beam might be useful in surgery, where it
could be tuned to the best frequency to cut cleanly through various kinds
of tissue. Congress was enthusiastic enough about this potential spin-off
to set up the Medical Free-Electron Laser programme, approving about $20
million each year for it.

Ionson says SDI can honestly claim credit for the free-electron laser:
‘It would not be anywhere as advanced today if there was no SDI.’ But he
says there are few other technologies where Star Wars made much of a difference.
Technologies such as missiles and sensors ‘would have proceeded at pretty
much the same pace’. Even particle accelerators didn’t benefit much. In
the Star Wars scenario, beams of subatomic particles would push away the
lightweight decoys that protect a nuclear warhead, allowing conventional
ground-based rockets to shoot down the warhead itself. ‘What we were really
doing was taking existing knowledge that was out there and spinning off
military applications,’ Ionson says.

Robert Jameson, a specialist on particle accelerators at Los Alamos,
says most of the basic breakthroughs in this technology occurred before
SDI. Much of the SDI research was dedicated to building devices that were
suited to being launched into space. Jameson’s research followed the same
pattern as the free-electron laser. Funding for his division went from
$10 million in 1983 to $80 million in 1987, declined somewhat in the late
1980s, and will plummet next year. His group is now trying to promote the
use of its particle accelerators in a scheme to transmute nuclear waste.
Beams of low-energy neutrons, aimed at plutonium or other long-lived radioactive
waste, will transform them into wastes with much shorter half-lives, and
release energy in the process.

As hopes for lasers, particle beams and other futuristic technologies
disappear, the SDI programme has come to resemble any other military R&D
programme. Current plans call for SDI to rely on traditional military technologies:
radars, rockets, and computerised guidance and control systems to make sure
rockets hit their targets. None of this technology has much relevance to
the civilian world. So the hopes for a technological boon from SDI now seem
focused on technologies sponsored by Ionson’s brainchild or by the Small
Business Innovative Research (SBIR) programme. Every federal agency that
sponsors research is required to set aside one per cent of its R&D budget
for an SBIR programme to promote commercial applications for advanced technology,
and the SDI generals decided that Ionson should be responsible for these
as well as the IST programme.

The IST and SBIR programmes, though a tiny portion of the SDI programme,
represent a substantial pot of money for basic research. Funding for the
two programmes accounts for 3 per cent of the total $32 billion spent, which
means they have passed out about $1 billion since 1985.

Dwight Duston, the present director of IST, says Ionson underestimates
the commercial payoff from SDI because he left the programme too early.
Today, he says, the results are rolling in. Every year, SDI puts out a report
on commercial spin-offs from its research. The most recent edition lists
48 spin-offs, all but 10 sponsored by the IST or SBIR programmes. Duston
claims one success story is unfolding at Satcon Technology Corporation in
Massachusetts, which used SDI funding to develop magnetic bearings. Such
bearings do not require traditional lubrication, because they suspend a
spinning metal part in a magnetic field, eliminating metal-on-metal contact.
They are useful in satellites because of their high precision and long life,
but may become important in air conditioning and refrigerators after CFCs
are phased out, says Duston. Most of the replacement chemicals cannot mix
with lubricants as easily as CFCs, so lubricating refrigerators will be
more difficult. In Duston’s view, Satcon is ‘perfectly positioned to make
lots of money’ from magnetic bearings.

A measure of success

Applied Technology Associates in New Mexico is developing sensors that
measure motion by monitoring the interaction between a fluid and a magnetic
field. These sensors could eliminate jitter in hand-held video cameras,
and the US Department of Transportation has used them to monitor what happens
to human dummies during crash tests with cars. AstroPower, in New Jersey,
is building brighter light-emitting diodes, based on solar cell technology,
that may be used in communications systems or in brake lights for cars.
According to some tests, brighter brake lights make the driver behind react
more quickly. A Massachusetts company, Science Research Laboratory, is building
electron-beam accelerators to replace cobalt-60 for sterilising medical
products. Both work by killing bacteria, but Duston believes the accelerators
will be cheaper, and less hazardous.

As Duston admits, however, the spin-offs listed in the report represent
a small minority, perhaps 10 per cent, of the projects his programme supports.
Most companies that receive IST contracts, he explains, ‘target military
technology and stay in that niche market. The heads of these companies are
perhaps not as entrepreneurial as they could be.’ But he argues that in
speculative research, a 10 per cent success rate is not to be scoffed at;
venture capitalists usually get their money back from only a few of the
many projects they support.

For the most part, even his success stories have yet to prove themselves
in the commercial marketplace. Most of Satcon’s revenues still come from
government research contracts, not sales of its magnetic bearings. Even
its ‘commercial’ customers are not refrigerator manufacturers, but aerospace
firms working for the military or NASA. Applied Technology Associates has
managed to sell a few hundred of its motion sensors, but 85 to 90 per cent
of its revenue still comes from government contracts. AstroPower is probably
one of the most promising companies, because it already has experience selling
conventional solar cells to commercial customers. Yet it still has to produce
prototypes of its new light-emitting diode to prove that it is reliable.

These difficulties are not unique to SDI; they plague almost all government
attempts to promote commercial uses of advanced technology. According to
Robert Stern, an independent consultant in Washington DC who evaluates government
technology programmes, Duston and his colleagues have done better than other
federal R&D officials in coaxing companies to find commercial applications
for their technology.

In December, the government’s National Institute of Standards and Technology
released a list of 23 industrial technology projects that it planned to
support, selected for their commercial importance. Stern notes that of the
23 companies, 4 had received funding from SDI. One of them was AstroPower.
Over the past two years, NIST has supported 42 companies, 8 of which were
already getting money from SDI. Stern says this is proof that Duston and
his colleagues are doing a good job of finding and supporting firms with
promising technology. Sceptics like Ionson suspect that these companies
are simply very good at persuading government officials, whether at SDI
or at NIST, to give them money.

SDI’s budget proposals for next year are still in flux. New leaders
in the Pentagon, appointed by Clinton, are reviewing SDI and, within the
next few days, the administration is expected to announce substantial cutbacks.
The programme is not dead though. Clinton has said he believes in continued
research on ways to defend against nuclear weapons. But the impetus has
been lost, and SDI will probably continue to shrink. It leaves behind scores
of research programmes started in lavish style only to wither away in the
face of technical obstacles. It also leaves behind scores of fascinating
research projects, some of which may turn out to be interesting someday,
though the interest in most cases will not extend beyond the military.

Almost exactly 10 years after Ronald Reagan first announced his dream
of weapons that would make nuclear weapons ‘impotent and obsolete’, it
is clear that the dream did not materialise. And SDI research failed to
produce a surge of useful technology for the US. As far as the economy is
concerned, there was little return on SDI’s $32 billion investment. But
James Ionson, the former SDI enthusiast and current corporate executive,
points out that getting a return on its investment was never the reason
for Star Wars: ‘The major thrust of SDI was to spend money, not to make
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