By Geoff Fein
The crew of the USS Lake Erie (CG-70) will have the responsibility of firing the missile the Pentagon hopes will demolish a wayward spy satellite and its fuel tank of hydrazine, a Navy official said yesterday.
The real-life attempt to knock out the National Reconnaissance Office (NRO) satellite will likely occur this week. The Pentagon has been looking at a timeframe of Feb. 17-25, Marine Gen. James Cartwright, vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told reporters during a Pentagon briefing last week (Defense Daily, Feb. 15).
Joining the Lake Erie will be the guided missile destroyer the USS Decatur (DDG-73) and the USS Russell (DDG-59). The Lake Erie will take the first shot, the Navy official noted.
In the coming days, the Lake Erie will fire a Standard Missile-3 (SM-3) equipped with a Kinetic Kill Vehicle (KKV). Using its Infrared seeker, the KKV will home in on the satellite and hopefully hit the satellite’s fuel tank which is filled with hydrazine, a fuel used to conduct controlled de-orbits of working satellites. The gas could be toxic if the fuel tank landed in a populated area and dispensed its contents. The hydrazine onboard the satellite is frozen. Just how much would melt on re- entry is unknown.
But unlike traditional ballistic missile tests where ballistic missiles give off a heat signature, shooting down an out of control satellite required modifications to both Lockheed Martin‘s [LMT] Aegis weapon system and Raytheon‘s [RTN] SM-3, the Navy official said.
“This event, I think, is pretty significant in terms of technical requirements. We are looking at a cold body in space, a body that has been shut down for some time and it doesn’t have the traditional heating up that a traditional ballistic missile has,” the official said. “It is moving at a speed that is a lot faster than previous engagements we have made. There are differences that will occur here that don’t make this business as usual.”
Additionally, the Navy had to come up with new methods to track the satellite, he added.
In a six week timeframe, a government-industry team of scientists, engineers and program officials assessed the problem, developed solutions, employed those fixes, tested the fixes in computer simulation and came up with a plan, the Navy official said. “It is a phenomenal achievement in and of itself that in six weeks they could do that.”
However, the official noted there is an expectation the satellite likely will heat up from the sun. That was a consideration for the timing of the launch, the official added.
Although it will be the SM-3 that ultimately destroys the missile, the Navy official also praised the Aegis weapon system that will control the missile flight.
“[I] don’t know that we have found its limits yet. We continue to find new mission areas and new capabilities,” he said of the Aegis system. “To do ballistic missile defense is the latest. We have taken that radar capability…we always knew it could see deep into space…and have tied it to an interceptor that is able to match the abilities of medium range and below ballistic missiles.”
Just as Cartwright told reporters late week, the Navy official yesterday reiterated that the software upgrades to enable the Aegis weapon system and the SM-3 to track and destroy the NRO satellite will not be incorporated into the Navy’s ballistic missile defense (BMD) program. In fact, should the first missile hit its target, the two extra missiles will be put back to their original BMD configuration, the official added.