When space lasers were considered a thing

The article fails to deliver on its headline, but it's still interesting.

SDI chief Lt. Gen. James Abrahamson, a veteran of the Pentagon's early manned space program , believed the reality of a U.S. space-based laser—even just a testbed—would deter the Soviets from deploying countermeasures. Indeed, he hoped that the U.S. intention to test a Death Star would be sufficiently daunting to obviate the need to deploy the weapon at all!

Zenith Star's components—its laser, focusing mirror, targeting and tracking systems—were already in various stages of development. It was to be a massive spacecraft, the size of a semi: eighty feet long, over forty feet in diameter, over forty-three tons’ mass. The weapon would have made up just one part of a multi-layered defense system. Its terrible heat ray could separate decoys from hardened warheads and blow up boosters, while other weapons attacked different targets.

Integration contractor Martin Marietta (now Lockheed Martin) proposed lofting this monster atop a super-sized version of its Titan missile, a four-engine beast appropriately named the Barbarian . Later iterations of the design split Zenith Star into two spacecraft, a laser module and a mirror-targeting module, for launching aboard less brawny boosters.

https://nationalinterest.org/feature/zenith-star-the-space-laser-won-the-cold-war-14481