ANTI-​​MISSILE “SUCCESS”: NOT EXACTLY

At first glance, it looks like good news for the Star Wars crowd: the Defense Department crowed today that their lat­est mis­sile defense test was a suc­cess.
A “step for­ward in the devel­op­ment (of) … the ‘lay­ered’ mis­sile defense sys­tem designed to inter­cept and destroy all types of bal­lis­tic mis­siles,” the Pentagon pro­claimed, after the Aegis Ballistic Missile Defense sys­tem, aboard the USS Lake Erie, hit its tar­get off the shores of Kauai.
But Victoria Samson, who tracks all things bal­lis­tic for the Center for Defense, is ask­ing us to take a sec­ond look.
“I find it laugh­able that they’re call­ing this test ‘a step for­ward’ when, by their own admis­sions, they dumbed down the test,” she tells Defense Tech.
The Aegis system’s last test, over the sum­mer, flopped badly. And the rea­son why, many peo­ple think, is that the interceptor’s “atti­tude con­trol sys­tem” cracked after being used in “pulse” mode.
So, this time around, the Pentagon decided not to “pulse” the interceptor’s con­trol sys­tem at all — even though that’s how the anti-​​missile mis­sile is sup­posed to work in the real world. A lower hur­dle to jump, in other words.

December 11th, 2003 | Missiles | Comments Off Both comments and pings are currently closed.