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U.S. Plans: Navy Will Test Aegis Interceptor Tonight By David Ruppe and Kerry Boyd The Navy will launch the interceptor, called the Aegis Lightweight Exoatmospheric Projectile (LEAP), tonight between 5 and 9 p.m. EST from the U.S.S. Lake Erie in the Pacific Ocean, and it will launch a medium-range target missile from the Pacific Missile Range Facility at Kauai, Hawaii, the Defense Department said in a statement. The focus of the launch will be to test the interceptor’s guidance system, rather than its ability to hit a missile in space. Although the primary goal is not to intercept the missile, it could happen, said Lt. Col. Rick Lehner, a press spokesman with the Pentagon’s Missile Defense Agency. “The goals are to test the sensor on board the interceptor and to track the target missile and get it into the ‘target basket,’ the immediate proximity of the target,” he said. While the test is considered to be for theater missile defense and will not violate the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, Lehner said the knowledge gained from the test could eventually benefit work to use the system for faster, higher-traveling ballistic missile targets in mid-flight. The Bush administration last summer abolished technical distinctions between the military’s national and theater missile defense programs, rolling them all into a consolidated missile defense effort that focuses on destroying enemy warheads at different parts of their trajectory. The LEAP technology “may some day be effective against long-range missiles, [but that’s a] long way down the road,” Lehner said. Sometime in the spring, the agency plans to conduct the first intercept test of the system, he said. The current test is “really a data collection test, almost a dress rehearsal for the first intercept test,” he said.
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