CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. -- The nation's most powerful unmanned rocket is set to loft into Earth orbit on Friday a missile warning satellite that in the coming years is likely to play a key role in the development and testing of any future missile defense scheme.
Liftoff of the Air Force Titan 4 rocket from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station is expected at 4:08 a.m. EDT (0808 GMT). The launch window extends for four hours and there is an 80 percent chance of acceptable weather conditions. Isolated coastal rainshowers are the only threat.
"The entire team is positive we're ready to go and we look forward to picking up the count," said Lt. Col. Dave Jones, Titan 4 launch director for the 45th Space Wing here at the Cape.
Riding atop the $460 million rocket built by Lockheed Martin is a $256 million Defense Support Program (DSP) missile warning satellite that was built by TRW. The satellite delivery mission will take nearly seven hours from liftoff to spacecraft separation.
This DSP is the 21st in a series that has covered three decades of service using heat-sensing instruments to detect missile launches and nuclear explosions anywhere on the planet and then instantaneously relay that information to the Pentagon.
Two more DSP's are scheduled to launch during the next few years before the system is replaced by the more advanced Space-Based Infrared System (SBIRS) in the 2006-7 timeframe."The Bush administration is moving ahead with an aggressive plan to develop a national missile defense system in the next few years," said Dwayne Day, a space policy analyst and visiting fellow at the National Air and Space Museum in Washington, D.C.
"A key part of that plan involves fielding new space-based sensors to detect missile launches. This is one of the last of the older technology DSP launches before the Air Force starts launching the new SBIRS birds," Day said.
Critics complain the DSP system is no longer needed in a world devoid of the Soviet Union, but program managers stress the world is still a dangerous place and the United States continues to need the information these DSP spacecraft provide, while also preparing for future programs related to the National Missile Defense.
"It certainly is not a relic of the Cold War. It is a continuation of our legacy over 30 years of successfully doing the mission of early missile warning," said Col. Charles Cornell, the deputy program director of the Air Force's SBIRS effort.
In addition to providing warnings of actual missile launches, the DSP satellites also allows the Pentagon to keep an eye on the missile programs of China, India, Pakistan, North Korea and other emerging nuclear powers.
DSP's sensitive infrared sensors detected Iraqi Scud missile launches during the Persian Gulf War and identified the first test firing of a new Iranian missile in 1998, while regularly conducting such non-military events as observing meteors burning up in the atmosphere and monitoring the spread of forest fires.
When deployed by the Air Force later this decade, the infrared sensors on the SBIRS spacecraft are expected to be far more sensitive that those installed on the current DSP early warning satellites, theoretically allowing missile detection much earlier.
"The missile defense guys have proven that they can hit a bullet with a bullet," Day said. "If SBIRS works, it'll help them track the bad guy's bullet as it comes out of the barrel."
advertisement
