Crucial Missile Defense Test Unsuccessful
July 9 -- The Pentagon’s latest test of a national missile defense system failed early Saturday morning.
It was the second miss in three tries.
At around 12:19 a.m. EDT a modified Minuteman II missile carrying a mock warhead — a cone-shaped object about 5 feet long — was launched from Vandenberg Air Force Base, in Calif.
About 20 minutes later, another missile carrying a complex machine called a “kill vehicle” — roughly the size of several breadboxes laid end-to-end — was launched from Kwajalein Atoll in the southern Pacific and guided by sophisticated radar.
But the kill vehicle failed to separate from the second stage rocket motor, or booster, of its missile, said Lt. Gen. Ronald Kadish, who heads the Pentagon’s Ballistic Missile Defense Organization, speaking to reporters after the test. He said the kill vehicle failed to receive a signal from the booster to separate.
Asked whether the failure suggests the system may never work as hoped, as critics charge, Kadish said, “What it tells me is that we have more engineering work to do.”
But he added, “it appears [the error] happened in an area that has little to do with the functionality of the key component of the system that we’re testing,” apparently referring to the kill vehicle.
Sensors on the kill vehicle were eventually supposed to guide it into the mock warhead, and not a decoy, at a speed of about 12,000 miles per hour, approximately 144 miles above the Pacific Ocean, in what was viewed as the most challenging aspect of the test.
The single decoy, a Mylar balloon, also failed to fully deploy, an official said.
Kadish did take a little consolation from the test. “At least three protesters with the environmental group Greenpeace were arrested, charged with trespassing at the Vandenberg Air Force Base,” he said just after watching the failure.
Greenpeace initially denied the arrests occurred.
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