The Pentagon’s Missile Defense Agency (MDA) and Navy have successfully carried out a test of the sea-based Aegis Ballistic Missile Defense system, intercepting a target over the Pacific Ocean this week.
The Aegis-equipped USS Lake Erie (CG-70), a Ticonderoga-class cruiser, detected, tracked and engaged a target missile launched from the Pacific Missile Range Facility on Kauai, Hawaii late Wednesday night. A Standard Missile 3 (SM-3) block 1B missile took off from the cruiser’s deck, acquired the target re-entry vehicle and collided with it, the Missile Defense Agency said.
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| The SM-3 block 1B missile launches off a naval vessel in 2012. Photo by Raytheon. |
The hit marked the 25th successful attempt in 31 tries for the Aegis BMD system, which is built by Lockheed Martin [LMT], since testing began in 2002. The test employed a recently upgraded version of Aegis to improve signal processing.
Raytheon [RTN] provides the SM-3 1B missile, the latest version of the SM-3 that has now had three successful hits. The first flight of that version, in September 2011, failed. Mitch Stevison, Raytheon’s director of the SM-3 program, told reporters on a conference call Thursday that the failure resulted from an “abnormal burn” in the boost rocket.
Stevison said the three recent successful tests have put the program on track for meeting its scheduled deployment in 2015 as part of the Obama administration’s missile defense plans for Europe known as the Phased Adaptive Approach. The first system will go in Romania and is called Aegis Ashore.
Stevison said the test was the most complex yet for the IB, which had to cope with a separating vehicle and distinguish between debris and burnt fuel to find the target. Testing on the SM-3 1B will continue to grow more complex, he said.
“Previous tests of the Raytheon SM-3 Block IB proved the weapon against a unitary target and a separating target with a complex debris scene,” he said. “This flight test continues to prove the robustness of the missile’s discrimination capabilities against threats that are representative of what we’d see in wartime conditions.”
Lockheed Martin’s Nick Bucci, the company’s director of BMD development, said the test showed Aegis was increasingly capable of taking on more difficult threats.
“Each success reaffirms Aegis as the foundation of a variety of systems that can combat the world’s increasingly sophisticated enemy threats,” he said.