Missile Defense: The Pentagon Steps Back By Randy Barrett Space News Correspondent posted: 07:00 am ET 11 July 2003
Untitled
The Pentagon is putting the brakes on plans to launch
a cluster of developmental space-based missile interceptors by 2005. A senior
Missile Defense Agency (MDA) official told SPACE.com a combination of
lagging technology and pressure from Capitol Hill has caused a rethinking of the
original schedule. Now the plan is to continue basic research on the
interceptors until at least 2008.
“We went out with a request for information [to
industry] to determine whether or not the technology was essentially here to be
able to execute the type of program we had talked about by 2005,” said Terry
Little, director of the Kinetic Energy Interceptor program at the MDA. “We
didn’t think so.”
The space-based interceptors were under consideration
by the MDA as a complement to ground based-modes of killing enemy missiles in
flight. In theory, the mini satellites would home in and destroy enemy missiles
in space by force of impact. But technical problems with miniaturization and
weight proved severely limiting, Little said.
Images
Brilliant Pebbles was a space-based, kinetic-energy weapon concept under development in the United States where 4,600 small interceptors would be deployed in orbit, each capable of homing in on and destroying incoming hostile warheads. IMAGE CREDIT: John Bretschneider
“If you enter development with major technical
issues, you’re going to end up in trouble,” Little said. “It’s a rule of
nature.” Limited funding also presented problems. The Pentagon has requested $14
million for the space interceptor test bed in 2004. “You need a lot of
satellites and they need to be affordable to buy and launch — they’re not
there,” Little said. Officials from several defense satellite manufacturing
companies declined to comment for this story.
Little also said the program was encountering some
resistance from Congress. He noted, for example, that during debate on the 2004
Defense Authorization bill, Sen. Jeff Bingaman (D-N.M.) introduced an amendment
to kill all funding for space-based weapons.
Bingaman’s amendment ultimately failed. But Phil
Coyle, an analyst with the Center for Defense Information here, said the fact
that it was introduced is a sign that the anti-proliferation movement in the
United States still has teeth.
“There’s no sense preheating the opposition when the
[Pentagon] doesn’t have anything to deliver,” Coyle, a former chief weapons
tester at the Pentagon, said.
Proponents of space-based missile defense were
disappointed by the MDA’s change of heart on the program. Hank Cooper, who was
director of the Ballistic Missile Defense Organization in the early 1990s, said
there are “fully exploitable” technologies left over from the original Star Wars
missile defense program that are applicable to a constellation of space-based
interceptors.
Much of the technology was developed under a program
dubbed Brilliant Pebbles, which was abandoned in 1993. “These guys that run the
Missile Defense Agency don’t have much of a clue about what the technology can
accomplish,” Cooper said.
Baker Spring, a missile defense analyst with Heritage
Foundation, a think tank here, agreed: “I find it surprising there couldn’t be
any [technologies] salvaged from the 1992 timeframe.”
Little said there is still strong support for
space-based interceptors in some quarters of the White House and that the latest
plan could change again in the future.
Meanwhile, the Pentagon is moving ahead with plans to
develop a ground-based interceptor that would knock out enemy missiles as they
launch. An award of design study contracts for that program, called KE Boost, is
due in December.
advertisement
