The Star Wars Sweepstakes

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Executives have to be concerned that their investments could fizzle like misfired rockets. Rockwell's Beall painfully remembers how his company spent $400 million to rev up for large-scale production of the B-1 bomber, only to have the program dropped during the Carter Administration. It has been restarted under Reagan. "There is the risk that it could happen again," he says. "But in this business you have to take chances. The real risk is in not taking any risks at all." Beall believes that even if his Star Wars business goes sour, the research will lead to improvement in other products, like infrared detection devices. In any case, SDI spending currently represents only a tiny part of the company's budget.

The risk can be greater for a small firm. At General Research in Santa Barbara, SDI contracts accounted for more than 8% of revenues in fiscal 1985, and that percentage is likely to grow rapidly. Nonetheless, says Leslie Wells, an assistant to the company's president, "we're not putting all our eggs in the SDI basket. It's not something that's going to cause the company to come to a screeching halt if it's discontinued."

Many of the scientific breakthroughs that businesses will need in order to make Star Wars a reality may come from university laboratories. SDIO has awarded $19 million to a five-member consortium made up of Auburn, Polytechnic Institute of New York, the State University of New York at Buffalo, Texas Tech and the University of Texas at Arlington. Their mission: to develop a power system for Star Wars weaponry. SDIO also approved a $9 million grant to a group of scientists at nine universities and other research institutions, including Carnegie-Mellon, Caltech, M.I.T. and Stanford. They will try to develop superfast optical computers, in which signals would be carried by light waves instead of electric currents.

At many universities, Star Wars has generated echoes of the 1960s protests against campus military research. This time, however, the dissension is led not by radical leftist undergraduates but by professors and graduate students. Anti-Star Wars petitions are circulating on at least 48 campuses, from the University of Utah to Princeton. At the University of Illinois at Champaign- Urbana, 53 of the 70 full professors in the physics department, which is the second largest in the U.S., have pledged not to seek SDI funds and signed a statement that calls the program "deeply misguided, dangerous and enormously expensive." About half the engineering and physics faculty members at Cornell have signed a similar denunciation of SDI. The professors argue that deployment of a Star Wars system could provoke the Soviet Union to build up its offensive arsenal in an effort to stay ahead of U.S. defensive capabilities.

University scientists engaged in Star Wars research staunchly defend their work, noting that the Soviets are building their own missile defenses. Says Wayne Anderson, a professor of electrical engineering at the State University of New York at Buffalo: "If we don't compete, we're in trouble." Other Star Wars supporters contend that the program need not lead to an escalation of the arms race. "We could offer to share our technology for stability and tie that to an arms build-down," says Robert McCrory, director of the Laboratory for Laser Energetics at the University of Rochester.