The college I went to we had 2 instructors that worked on the program. I have a laser electro optic's degree. They were trying to develop it and get it off the ground but we basically lied to the rest of the world during the Cold War. Probably one of the largest bluffs we ever put out. Concept is actually interesting you take a high enough powered laser and punch holes in a new nuclear ballistic missile casing while in outer space and then it comes back in for reinjury. It basically just burns up due to the damaged it sustained and then you primary left with uranium falling back to the earth. It's something to that effect. Also there was the we can knock out your satellites with the same laser. This takes an immense amount of power from a laser to do this, but a cool thing. It happens in a brief of a second. One the instructors used to work on a project I think UCLA or somewhere in California, where they used to take measurements from the Earth to the moon so there is a corner cube reflector up on the moon that they would shoot at, and when they get a reading for the return laser light depending on how much time it took this would tell you how far the moon was from the Earth since light travels at a constant speed kind of.