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| U.S. fails to hit missile mimicking Iranian strike | |
| 2010-02-02 | |
| WASHINGTON, Feb 1 (Reuters) - A U.S. attempt to shoot down a ballistic missile mimicking an attack from Iran failed after a malfunction in a radar built by Raytheon Co (RTN.N), the Defense Department said. The botched $150 million test over the Pacific Ocean coincided with a Pentagon report that Iran had expanded its ballistic missile capabilities and posed a "significant" threat to U.S. and allied forces in the Middle East region. In the exercise on Sunday, both the target missile, fired from Kwajalein in the Marshall Islands, and the interceptor, from Vandenberg Air Force Base in California, performed normally, the Missile Defense Agency said. "However, the Sea-Based X-band radar did not perform as expected," the agency said on its website. Officials will investigate the cause of the failure to intercept, it said. The SBX radar is a major component of the ground-based midcourse defense, the sole U.S. bulwark against long-range missiles that could be tipped with chemical, biological or nuclear warheads.
Raytheon and Boeing Co, which manages the core ground-based midcourse defense, declined to comment on the test failure. Harris Corp, which provides systems engineering for the SBX radar, said its technology was not involved. David Altwegg, the Missile Defense Agency's executive director, said the layered, multibillion-dollar missile defense continued to be dogged by insufficient attention to detail by the Pentagon's top contractors. But he said it was too early to assess blame for the miss. "We have problems with all our primes," Altwegg told a Pentagon budget briefing. He said it would probably take months to pin down exactly what went wrong. "Across the enterprise ... quality is a disappointment," he said. Speaking at the Reuters Aerospace and Defense Summit in Washington in December, Army Lieutenant General Patrick O'Reilly, head of the Missile Defense Agency, had said the flight test was to break new ground. He described it then as "more of a head-on shot like you would use defending against an Iranian shot into the United States." It was the first time such a scenario was being tested, he said. Experts have compared this to a bullet hitting another bullet in space. O'Reilly said the goal was to destroy the target over the north-central Pacific when the missiles had a combined closing speed of more than 17,000 miles per hour (27,000 kph). The SBX radar is mounted on a mobile, ocean-going oil-drilling platform designed to provide a powerful sensor that can be positioned to cover any spot on the globe. | |
| Posted by:Steve White |
| #3 Is the SBX the big Epcot Center looking thing in Pearl Harbor? |
| Posted by: bigjim-CA 2010-02-02 17:18 |
| #2 I'm just glad they're working the bugs out now, and not in the middle of a real attack, but I'm silly that way. |
| Posted by: trailing wife 2010-02-02 14:12 |
| #1 Of course, if the current administration hadn't insisted on undoing the Bush agreements re: missile defense in Europe etc. then we wouldn't NEED to hit the missile head-on in order to protect the US. We would have ample opportunities to hit it from the side, long before it got close. |
| Posted by: lotp 2010-02-02 09:00 |