At 7:52 p.m. last night, an Air Force Atlas 501 rocket shot the capsule enclosed X-37B Orbital Test Vehicle into space from Cape Canaveral. Resembling a small space shuttle, the OTV was built in Boeing’s famed Phantom Works. The OTV will serve as an “on-orbit” laboratory for new sensors and other high-tech devices that will […]
Star Wars
This story first appeared in Aerospace Daily’s Defense Technology International and is written by Michael A. Taverna. NATO members appear ready to approve deployment of a territorial ballistic missile defense (BMD) network in Europe, although the scope of the European contribution is uncertain. At a missile defense conference here last week, experts from both […]
Video of a recent test shot of Boeing’s ABL test plane shooting down a short-range ballistic missile. According to a Boeing release… This experiment marks the first time a laser weapon has engaged and destroyed an in-flight ballistic missile, and the first time that any system has accomplished it in the missile’s boost phase of […]
I have to take issue with DT colleague John Noonan’s post at the Weekly Standard blog today on the story (revelation?) that the Russians are reluctantly working on anti-satellite weapons to counter U.S. missile defense initiatives and other perceived ills. John says essentially “what’s the news here?” The Sovs had been working on this technology […]
The U.S. Navy marshaled its resources quickly to shoot down a broken satellite recently, but there are no plans to stay ready for a repeat performance, a senior Navy official said Wednesday. When the U.S. government decided that the falling spy satellite posed a risk, missile defense officials assembled a takedown plan within weeks. It […]
