Star Wars continues, but now we are shooting upwards. As TK wrote:

I keep telling them: lasers from space. Lasers from space. I'm like a
broken record with my lasers from space.

Then what does this frickin' administration do?

Earth-bound lasers to -- not from -- TO space. Come on, people! Get with
the program!

Sadly enough, this makes much more sense to me than TK's space sharks shooting
downwards.

It probably would not take much to severely damage a spy satellite, which would
be pointing its very sensitive optics downward. So this really could work with
reasonable assumptions, as opposed to blowing up missles, which would be
freaking hard (not impossible, but really hard).

So as I understand it, it uses adaptive optics to determine how the atmosphere
would cause the beam to become incoherant (slightly like this commentary) and
then probably uses a deformable mirror to send out a deliberately diverging
beam, that the atmosphere would then refocus. Pretty neat.

I got to wonder how they close the loop, do they shoot the beam first and then
use it to close the loop? So that would give the satellite a brief warning that
trouble was coming. How about the tip/tilt correction? If I recall my AO you
can't use the laser for that. If you need stars then you probably need a big
piece of glass to be sure you have a bright enough star nearby your target...

Anyway, I am now fairly far out of my field. I just want to blow up satellites
in space.

This reminds of a disturbing story I read about satellite war. If you blew up an
atomic weapon in low orbit it would trash most unhardened satellites (i.e.
everything except for some small percentage of military satellites). This would
take out most global communications in a single shot. But who has ICBMs and
atomic weapons? Ah, North Korea, you find new ways to scare us every day.