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Pentagon Delays Next Sea-Based Missile Defense Test Until 2005
The U.S. Missile Defense Agency has delayed a test of the Navy’s sea-based missile defense system by almost an entire year, InsideDefense.com reported yesterday (see GSN, Dec. 12, 2003). Flight Mission-7, which was originally scheduled for this spring, will be held in January 2005, according to a senior MDA official. The Navy is scheduled to field sea-based missile defense radars this fall as part of the national missile defense system. The delay was prompted by a funding shortfall and a decision to forgo testing on the SM-3 Block 0 missile and a preliminary version of the Aegis ballistic missile defense computer program. Those systems were successfully tested Dec. 11 and Navy officials are now pushing to develop the technology in the SM-3 Block 1 missile and the final Aegis computer program, both of which are planned to be be deployed in the fall of 2005. “What we need to do is put our engineering effort and our other resources on delivering (the initial defense system),” the official said. “It was money but it was also people resources and management focus. There was really not an awful lot left to learn with the configuration we were using today,” the official added (Thomas Duffy, InsideDefense.com, Jan. 12).
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