THE DOCUMENTS
DOW-UAP-D124, “AAWSAP DIRD Space Access Where Weve Been and Where We Could Go March 8 2010”, and DOW-UAP-D143, “AAWSAP DIRD Laser Lightcraft Nanosatellites November 1 2010”, two Department of War records from the U.S. Department of War’s PURSUE Release 06, published at war.gov/ufo on 18 September 2026. Both titles are the release’s, taken from the file names. The documents’ own titles, on the covers, are Space Access: Where We’ve Been … and Where We Could Go and Laser Lightcraft Nanosatellites. Both covers are Defense Intelligence Reference Document covers with the Defense Intelligence Agency seal. D124’s carries the series line Acquisition Threat Support, 8 March 2010, ICOD: 1 December 2009 and DIA-08-1001-006; its p. 2 names the Acquisition Support Division (DWO-3) of the Defense Warning Office, places the paper in a series of advanced technology reports produced in FY 2009 under the Advanced Aerospace Weapon System Applications (AAWSA) Program, and routes comments to ATTN: CLAR/DWO-3. D143’s carries the series line Defense Futures, 01 November 2010, ICOD 30 August 2010 and DIA-08-1011-001; its p. 2 adds a boxed sentence defining the document type, names the Technology Warning Division (DWO-4), gives FY 2010 and routes comments to ATTN: JUIAF - DI/DWO-3. D124 runs to 56 pages: seven of front matter ending with an Introduction, nine sections (pp. 8 to 49), four appendices and 34 endnotes (p. 56). D143 runs to 77: four of front matter, a two-page Summary, five chapters (pp. 7 to 74; p. 30 is blank) and 35 references. This briefing cites PDF pages. Every page of both is marked UNCLASSIFIED with FOR OFFICIAL USE ONLY struck through. The only redactions are labels on each p. 2, none a black bar and none with an exemption code: the author’s name replaced by AAP Person 67 and AAP Person 58, in large type with no box, and the programme manager’s by AAP Person 1, in one thin-ruled box in D124 and two empty boxes with the label set in the margins in D143.
Why this one is worth your time
These are two of the 37 papers the release files as Defense Intelligence Reference Documents, DOW-UAP-D117 to D153, and both are about getting mass into low Earth orbit cheaply and often. They carry different front matter, with a different series line, preparing office and fiscal year, and they reach different diagnoses: D124 says the missing piece is hardware discipline and infrastructure, not technology (p. 5); D143 says it is a laser powerful enough at the right wavelength (pp. 17, 27).
What the documents say
D124, the argument. The Introduction says commercial access to space is a straightforward effort dominated by propulsion and reliability, that the key requirement is a robust and not necessarily low-cost infrastructure, and that this is a matter of skill and demonstrated hardware, not necessarily of technology (p. 5). Saturn I and Saturn V, it argues, were readied quickly because their hardware rested on a frozen design and proven processes (p. 6). In the late 1950s military competition with the Soviet Union, it says, produced a predisposition to launch on rockets derived from ballistic missiles, and the aircraft path to space ended with the X-15; apart from the experimental Delta Clipper, no operational launcher has ever successfully aborted, and a reusable launcher is an expendable with some parts reused a few times (p. 7).
Gliders, air launch and rockets. Much of the body is a history of 1960s lifting-body hypersonic gliders, among them designs proposed to support the Manned Orbiting Laboratory (pp. 9 to 29). The paper says its preferred glider and cruiser, with hypersonic lift-to-drag ratios above 2.7, have unpowered cross ranges above 4,500 nautical miles (p. 17), so that a station crew could board gliders attached to the station and be on the ground in under 90 minutes in an emergency (p. 21). It proposes launching from atop large transports, an An-225 carrying a spacecraft with a 7-metric-ton payload in a concept it credits to a Russian designer, and says most commercial transports larger than an ERJ 170 are potential mobile launch platforms (p. 9). On the paper’s account of personal conversations with its author, that designer said a Russian government agency forced him to limit his gliders’ glide range to ensure recovery in continental Russia and prevent escape to the United States (p. 21). The XLR-129 engine, it says, reached full pressure in just over 3 months; the text gives it 42 simulated flights without overhaul where the Figure 28 caption on the same page gives 40 test cycles, both seen on the page image, and a quoted book passage has NASA cancelling its liquid oxygen turbopump (p. 32). Studies that mandated horizontal takeoff regardless of mass ratio, it argues, gave air-breathing propulsion a too heavy label; above a weight ratio of 4.3 it finds vertical takeoff or air launch best (pp. 37, 39).
The Qu tube. A two-page section describes a heat pipe that, the paper says, conducts heat almost instantly; it says any attempt to open one fails because the contents react into an inert powder, and that the Chinese team associated with its originator was not about to let the discovery into American hands (p. 30). Page 31 reproduces a page of a University of Alabama, Huntsville annual report which calls the tube somewhat controversial, read from the page image.
Launch rates and infrastructure. The paper puts one year of support for the Manned Orbiting Laboratory at a minimum of 74 launches (p. 42), and its Appendix A summarises four 1964 and 1965 studies of a station for 20 to 27 people served by 74 flights a year (pp. 50 to 51). It says most of the 1960s glider work was abandoned and discarded (p. 44), likens today’s one-way trips to Conestoga wagons (p. 45), and argues for a space infrastructure on the model of a rail marshalling yard, listing 25 elements in Table 2 (pp. 46, 48 to 49). Its one weapons passage, in Appendix C on the operating costs of a transatmospheric vehicle squadron, describes kinetic penetrators in a rocket-accelerated entry nose cone, with a terminal speed and an ordnance comparison this briefing does not reproduce (p. 54).
D143, the proposal. The Summary sets size classes (a nanosat below 10 kg, a picosat 0.1 kg to 1.0 kg), says nanosats for MASINT or SIGINT will be three-axis stabilised, and sets a recurring cost not to exceed $500k each (p. 5). Chapter 1 proposes that the laser beam used to launch a nanosat also provide its velocity changes in orbit (p. 7). Chapter 2 describes the Lightcraft, which the paper says flies in airbreathing mode up to Mach 5 and 30 km and as a laser thermal rocket in space (p. 15). The project, it says, grew out of a Strategic Defense Initiative Organization programme of the late 1980s; flights on an Army laser at White Sands reached 43 m vertically and 121.9 m along a guide wire, a later series 38.7 m, and a private communication of 2009 reported 68 m (p. 17). It lists single-stage-to-orbit, full reusability and estimated launch costs of $20 to $600 per kg of payload, not including life cycle and launch operations costs, and says “The feasibility and physics principles have been proven by the AFRL’s Lightcraft” programme (p. 21). The laser wavelength it rates best for propagation, it says, is so far available only at a small fraction of the power needed (p. 27).
Missions, lasers and costs. Chapter 3 reports a study of future Air Force launch missions whose most promising mission was placing Earth and space observing nanosats of up to 3 kg in low Earth orbit, the craft doubling as a Lightsat telescope for observing military targets (p. 31). It states a military need for 1.0 kg to 2.0 kg nanosats with optical sensors for visual inspection of unknown objects in space and on Earth (p. 34). It also sets out ballistic missile interception and the elimination of jamming satellites, with impact energies, masses and engagement geometry in Tables 4 and 5 that this briefing describes and does not reproduce (pp. 32 to 39), and five swarm concepts for radio collection, radiometry, radar and hyperspectral sensing, which it says “probably can be demonstrated by 2015 and deployed” in space by 2020 (pp. 40 to 45). Chapter 4 summarises a 2002 industry study of multi-megawatt lasers, which put an installed 10 MW transmitter at about $230 million (p. 50), and reviews solid-state, fibre and free-electron lasers drawn from directed energy weapons programmes (pp. 52 to 71). Its cost figures differ in scope: $532 per kg for electricity and lasing gas alone (p. 51), $3,052 per kg including operations in Table 1 (p. 29), and a back-of-the-envelope $100 to $300 per kg for launch and $800 to $2,000 all in (p. 66). The Conclusion says the Air Force Research Laboratory concluded its laser Lightcraft programme in 2005 before a launch to orbit was demonstrated, and that AFOSR now funds a Brazilian Air Force shock tunnel study with a United States university group (pp. 73 to 74).
What the documents do not say
Neither paper uses UAP or UFO (case-insensitive substring, issued text layer, the only layer either carries). Unidentified appears once in D124 and never in D143: on p. 32, for the model of a boost-glide vehicle shown in Figure 27, which the paper says was not readily identifiable when it turned up on a desk. The stem anomal returns nothing in D124 and one hit in D143, anomalies on the spacecraft, in a passage on housekeeping data (p. 13). Unknown appears in D143 only in the p. 34 sentence on inspecting unknown objects, which the paper does not develop. Extraterrestrial, alien and saucer return nothing in either.
Neither paper names a contract under which it was written, a study area or another paper in the series. AAWSA appears twice in each, both on p. 2; AAWSAP and DIRD appear in neither. In D124, threat appears only in the cover’s series line and foreign not at all; its only dollar figures are the 1984 operating-cost estimates of Figure 45 (p. 54), and it sets no date or budget for anything it proposes. D143 names no adversary: Russia, Soviet, China and Iran return nothing, and its missile threats are defined by range and speed alone (pp. 38 to 39). It gives no reason for the 2005 conclusion of the Air Force programme, and its closing recommendation carries no date, cost or schedule (pp. 73 to 74). Its Summary covers small satellites and their laser propulsion and does not mention the mission study or the recommendation (pp. 5 to 6).
The front matter replaces each author’s name with a label (p. 2). D124’s own text writes in places of its author’s work, travels, conversations and possessions (pp. 5, 8, 9, 13, 21, 27, 30, 32, 40 to 42); D143 speaks once of This author (p. 74) and credits material to named people in figure captions and private communications (pp. 16 to 21, 41, 53). This briefing prints none of the names or institutions those passages tie to either author.
From the record
is not necessarily a matter of technology. However, technology
DOW-UAP-D124, p. 5, the Introduction; the line closes the sentence that begins It on the line before and opens the next, which continues: discovery and development are necessary for future space travel beyond Earth’s environs.
NASA promptly canceled the liquid oxygen turbopump because it would be unfair to our
DOW-UAP-D124, p. 32, the passage the paper quotes from a book on Pratt & Whitney engine projects, opening the Rocket Propulsion section; the sentence continues: competitors to fund it.
the rocket proponents have defeated an air-breathing solution since the first aerospace
DOW-UAP-D124, p. 40, the last sentence of the section Up-and-Down Operations, which begins And so on the line before; the sentence continues: plane in 1958.
Is it a technology issue? Hardly! We have known for 50 years how to create it.
DOW-UAP-D124, p. 46, a complete line in the Conclusion, directly after the question of how a LEO infrastructure is to be created
first new method of achieving orbit since the late 1950’s. In this concept, a remote or
DOW-UAP-D143, p. 15, the opening paragraph of Chapter 2; the line closes the sentence that begins By launching spacecraft on a beam of electromagnetic radiation and opens the next, which continues: ground-based energy source, such as a ground- or space-based laser beam generator,
Thus, no truly attractive Lightcraft combat mission was found. On the other hand,
DOW-UAP-D143, p. 33, the summary of the mission investigations in Chapter 3, which the contents call Laser Lightcraft Weapon Mission Selection Study; the line holds one sentence and opens the next, which continues: Lightcraft were found to be extremely attractive, compared to chemical rockets, in
which are only developed in directed energy weapons (DEW) programs. However,
DOW-UAP-D143, p. 53, the review of bulk slab solid-state lasers in Chapter 4; the line closes the sentence that begins Laser propulsion requires megawatt-class lasers and opens the next, on scaling those lasers further
Lightcraft propulsion R&D to the United States and restart the space launch test flight
DOW-UAP-D143, p. 74, the closing recommendation of the paper; the sentence begins: This author recommends that the Department of Defense, in collaboration with NASA, return laser
Where the case connects
The release files both papers under the same prefix as the contract records DOW-UAP-D110 to D116, which Release 06 Briefing 10 covers; neither paper names a contract of its own. D143 makes its heaviest air-launched case conditional on hypersonic MHD airbreathing propulsion research it says is under way at the NSF, NASA and the Air Force Research Laboratory (p. 33); the release’s MHD paper, DOW-UAP-D149, is one of the three papers Release 06 Briefing 19 covers, and neither paper names the other. Release 06 Briefing 24 covers the release as a whole.
Read it yourself
DOW-UAP-D124, “AAWSAP DIRD Space Access Where Weve Been and Where We Could Go March 8 2010”, and DOW-UAP-D143, “AAWSAP DIRD Laser Lightcraft Nanosatellites November 1 2010”, are hosted at war.gov in PURSUE Release 06. In DOW-UAP-D124 the Introduction is pages 5 to 7 of the PDF and the Conclusion pages 44 to 49; in DOW-UAP-D143 the mission study is pages 31 to 45 and the Conclusion pages 72 to 74.
Read the files. Decide for yourself.
Related wiki entries
The wiki entries below give background on the programme and publisher behind this briefing, and on the subjects it touches.
References and further reading
- DOW-UAP-D124, “AAWSAP DIRD Space Access Where Weve Been and Where We Could Go March 8 2010”, PURSUE Release 06, U.S. Department of War, hosted at war.gov/ufo
- DOW-UAP-D143, “AAWSAP DIRD Laser Lightcraft Nanosatellites November 1 2010”, PURSUE Release 06, U.S. Department of War, hosted at war.gov/ufo
- Presidential Unsealing and Reporting System for UAP Encounters (PURSUE), U.S. Department of War, war.gov/ufo
- AARO UAP Records, All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office, aaro.mil/UAP-Records
- Signals from the Periphery, Release 06 Briefing 10, on the contract file, DOW-UAP-D110 to D116
- Signals from the Periphery, Release 06 Briefing 19, on DOW-UAP-D121, D147 and D149, the microwave, ultracapacitor and MHD papers
- Signals from the Periphery, Release 06 Briefing 24, on the release as a whole