Global Security Newswire

WASHINGTON — The U.S. Missile Defense Agency plans this month to conduct the first flight test of a Lockheed Martin rocket competing to be the booster rocket for the agency’s national Ground-based Midcourse Defense system, which the Bush administration has vowed to deploy one year from now, MDA spokesman Chris Taylor said yesterday.

Lockheed Martin and Orbital Sciences are competing to win the GMD booster contract and Orbital conducted the first test of its version in August (see GSN, Aug. 18), but the Lockheed Martin booster verification test has been delayed. It was once scheduled to take place before the Orbital test (see GSN, Aug. 6).

In addition to the delay in testing the Lockheed Martin rocket, MDA has also pushed back the next Orbital test from next month to December, according to an Orbital source. Taylor said that test and the equivalent Lockheed Martin test, designated Integrated Flight Test (IFT)-13a and -13b, will both be completed “before the first of the year.”

The first flight test of Lockheed Martin’s product now comes nearly two months after Orbital’s booster verification test, but delaying the next Orbital test would put tests of the rival rockets back on a roughly parallel schedule. In any case, Maj. Gen. John Holly, MDA’s manager for Ground-based Midcourse Defense, said in August that the agency would field both rockets at least through 2005 at bases in Alaska and California (see GSN, Aug. 21).

The booster verification tests involve rockets with dummy payloads, rather than actual kill vehicles, and the IFT-13 tests are to involve real kill-vehicle payloads but no attempt will be made to intercept targets. A subsequent series of booster tests involving actual intercept attempts ― IFT-14a and -14b ― is planned for next year, but the agency has not disclosed when.

The Bush administration has set an October 2004 deadline for deployment of Ground-based Midcourse Defense, a target critics call unrealistic.

Center for Defense Information senior adviser Philip Coyle said today that the latest booster-selection delays should have no significant effect on the overall timeline. Coyle added, though, that repeated past delays in developing the GMD booster rocket have slowed the overall development of national missile defense. Originally, the agency tried to use boosters based on a Minuteman ICBM design, but that approach proved unsatisfactory.

“If you go back far enough, there was a point in time in the ground-based program … when the booster development was to have been finished in the year 2000. … Depending on how you do the arithmetic, the booster development program itself has delayed the program for about three years.”

In addition, MDA has canceled a number of flight-intercept tests this year, fueling criticism of the administration’s deadline (see GSN, April 18). Industry and military representatives indicated this week that MDA appears to be seeking ways to condense its schedule as the deadline for deployment draws closer.

Lt. Gen. Joseph Cosumano, head of the U.S. Army Space and Missile Defense Command, repeated yesterday that Ground-based Midcourse Defense, initially using six interceptors in Alaska and four in California, “will be operational” by this time next year.

An extensive series of tests that goes well beyond booster selection is still required before the system can be deployed in October, and missile defense officials acknowledge that next October’s deployment will provide only a preliminary capability. Holly said in August that he expects the system as initially deployed to be a “70-percent” solution.

Coyle cited planned satellite and radar capabilities as two key elements that are not likely to be in place by next October.

“The president is determined and the Missile Defense Agency is determined to deploy something. They may not be able to deploy much, but they’ll deploy something,” Coyle said.