GMD intercept failure...

[K. A. Pital]

MDA release

10-NEWS-0001
January 31, 2010
Missile Defense Test Conducted

The Missile Defense Agency conducted a flight test today of the Ground-Based Midcourse Defense System.

A target missile was successfully launched at approximately 3:40 p.m. PST from the U.S. Army’s Reagan Test Site at Kwajalein Atoll in the Republic of the Marshall Islands. Approximately six minutes later, a Ground-Based Interceptor was successfully launched from Vandenberg Air Force Base, Calif. Both the target missile and Ground-Based Interceptor performed nominally after launch. However, the Sea-Based X-band radar did not perform as expected.

Program officials will conduct an extensive investigation to determine the cause of the failure to intercept.

Pretty dry, eh? Tough times seem to be ahead for GBI - even if the missile functions normally, a failure in other system elements (like the Sea-based X Band) won't do the public and admin perception any good.

In these times of CUTS CUTS CUTS, including the cancellation of East European ground interceptor deployments, can the MDA's ground interceptors even survive? A few failures like this, and I feel they'll get the knife - it's already there, because of the European cancellation.

[MKSheppard]

Hum. At least THIS time the target missile worked.

Course; this is all a symptom of underfunding. During Nike Zeus development, we fired over 100~ ZEUS shots.

With so few tests, and so much time between them things get slowed down a lot.

[K. A. Pital]

I think modern interceptor missiles got a bit more expensive too, to fire them in huge batches. I'm saying that because the long-ranged A-135 interceptors apparently were quite expensive in construction. Not sure how many test firings there were...

51T6 has a starting weight almost same as that of the Topol. Can't do many rapid tests with such toys, I fear. The GBI rocket seems to be 4 times lighter - can anyone corroborate?

[Sea Skimmer]

In these times of CUTS CUTS CUTS, including the cancellation of East European ground interceptor deployments, can the MDA's ground interceptors even survive? A few failures like this, and I feel they'll get the knife - it's already there, because of the European cancellation.

It failed a shitload of other times without being canceled, this won’t mean much. The 1970s deployment was different, since it only protected a few ICBM silos rather then a broad swath of the entire US.

Remember, we already have that radar we wanted to put in Europe too. Its on Kwajalein Island right now. Money wasn’t the issue, all politics. But now we can think about putting that radar at other locations. Or just build ever more AN/TPY-2 sets and start placing those all over the world…. Except we’ve alreadt been doing that. One sent to Japan, one or two (they built two radar towers for them, they wont say what is deployed) to Israel and supposedly another one is in an undisclosed Gulf State. Almost certainly Qatar. Plus being mobile, they could appear anywhere else in the world in 24 hours.

GBI weighs 28,000lb. A Minuteman III is about 78,000lb in comparison, Peacekeeper about 193,000lb.

[K. A. Pital]

12000 kg? That's three times smaller than the 51T6, heh. Pretty good effieciency for an exoatmospheric interceptor there. Perhaps it won't get cancelled after all.

[Sea Skimmer]

Well it only makes sense, 51T6 is a couple decades older in design and GBI has a very light warhead since its just a hit to kill vehicle. The late 1960s early 70s LIM-49 Spartan missile was 29,000lb in comparison, about the same, but it only had 460 mile slant range vs. around 3,000 miles for GBI. That was because of inferior technology, and it need to haul around a 5 megaton nuke. Also fire control radar limitations placed a limit on how much range was actually useful. GBI can only use its full range in conjunction with the sensor fusion of several different radars. We just couldn’t make that work before and its one of the reasons why GBI continues to be tested even after deployment.

[K. A. Pital]

If the radar failure rate will continue to be high though, it places the system in doubt - regardless of how well the missile functions, if the X-band fails to correctly direct the interceptor in Y out of X times where Y is a statistically significant value...