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U.S. Missile Defense Agency to Test Kill Vehicle
The U.S. Defense Department for the first time plans to launch a missile interceptor booster equipped with a kill vehicle from Vandenberg Air Force Base in California, Inside Missile Defense reported yesterday (see GSN, July 21). The missile defense test is set for August or September. The Missile Defense Agency plans to announce the date about a week before the test, according to spokesman Rick Lehner. Flight Test 2 would involve an interceptor launched from Vandenberg Air Force Base and a target missile fired from Alaska, Lehner said. Officials initially did not plan to launch a target missile, according to Lehner, but a test conducted in November “did so well that the original plan to just launch an interceptor from Vandenberg AFB without launching a target was discarded in favor of launching a target for that test.” “What we haven’t done is launched an interceptor with the kill vehicle from Vandenberg, and this will be the first time that we do that in the FT-2 [test] that’s coming up,” agency Director Lt. Gen. Henry Obering said at an April 4 meeting of the Senate Armed Services Strategic Forces Subcommittee. “We’re putting a target out there because we want to be able to do the tracking of the target across the radar, feeding that track data into the fire control system, getting the interceptor into place, comparing that with the target characterization that is seen by the interceptor,” Obering said. “An intercept could occur … but that is not the primary objective.” The agency plans to conduct two flight tests in fiscal 2007 — one between October 2006 and March 2007, and the second between April and September 2007, according to Lehner (John Liang, Inside Missile Defense, Aug. 16).
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