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WASHINGTON: Technology and weather permitting, a ballistic missile is scheduled to launch from an island in Alaska early Thursday and be tracked by satellite and radars on land and at sea as it arcs over the Pacific Ocean toward California.
Less than 20 minutes later, if the Pentagon's missile defense system is up to the task, an interceptor will launch from Vandenberg Air Force Base, north of Santa Barbara, to collide with the attacking missile more than 100 miles, or 160 kilometers, above the Earth - and several hundred miles offshore - destroying it by high-speed impact.
Pentagon officials are taking a calculatedly ho-hum attitude toward the test, which already has been delayed by software problems for five months: They say this is just one more in a long sequence of opportunities to validate President George W. Bush's prudent goal of fielding limited missile defenses to shield the United States from attack by a rogue state, such as North Korea or Iran.
But the test comes at a decisive moment on Capitol Hill, as well as in capitals across Europe. Much is riding on this full test of the system, only the second conducted so far.
Skeptics in Congress have been threatening to slash the missile defense budget, and Moscow has warned that relations with Washington could rupture if the United States moves ahead with plans to base the system's interceptors and radars in former Soviet client states.
This month, the House of Representatives cut more than $764 million from the administration's proposed spending on missile defenses in the next financial year. Representative Ellen Tauscher, the California Democrat who is chairwoman of the Armed Services subcommittee on strategic forces, said the House bill deleted money for preparing proposed missile defense sites in Poland and the Czech Republic, and instead focused spending on technologies viewed as having more immediate promise.
"We want the Missile Defense Agency to deal with the near-term threats to the war-fighter, to the American people here, at home, and to our European allies and deployed troops," she said. "Too much of the assets were for the future, for yet-to-be defined science projects."
The House version protected money for three missile defense systems: They are known as the Patriot Advanced Capability 3, the Aegis and the Terminal High-Altitude Area Defense. Those all aim at warheads as they close in on their targets, rather than being designed to strike missiles in space during the middle course of their flight, which is the type of system scheduled for the test this week.
In the Senate, the Armed Services Committee has been debating its own version of the military spending legislation this week. The House bill and what emerges from the Senate will have to be reconciled before both houses of Congress vote on the financial 2008 Defense Department budget, and both Democrats and Republicans say the results from this next missile defense test will weigh heavily as they decide how to cast their ultimate votes on the antimissile portion of the bill.
The administration's diplomatic efforts also moved to a new and higher level this week, State Department officials said. John Rood, assistant secretary of state for international security, was traveling between Warsaw and Prague this week for what one State Department official said was "the start of formal negotiations" to deploy 10 interceptors in Poland and a tracking radar in the Czech Republic.
In a subtle indication of the scheduled time and place for the next test, the military issued an alert for ship captains and airplane pilots in the territory to be used, with the alert in effect Thursday between 8 a.m. and noon Pacific Daylight Time.
Military meteorologists already were warning of foul weather. Safety rules require that the attacking missile, to be launched from Kodiak Island, be visible to monitors who can push a destruct button if it veers off course after take-off.
Richard Lehner, spokesman for the Missile Defense Agency, said that even though a general time and general location for the test this week will be known to operators of the missile interceptor, "This will be as realistic as it can be, based upon what we are allowed to do within various safety regulations."
That does not satisfy skeptics.
"The test is highly choreographed, and much simpler than what the system would face in a real battle engagement and in a real threat environment," said Frederick Lamb, a professor of physics and astronomy at the University of Illinois.
Lamb, who conducted a missile defense study for the American Physical Society, expressed concerns that a successful test this week would be cited as proof that "the system has a substantial capability in a real battle situation. That would be a gross exaggeration."
If the test proceeds on Thursday, space satellites will deliver the first alert of the attacking rocket's launch to missile defense operators based in Colorado Springs, the military's headquarters for homeland defense, who will control the interceptor in its silo at Vandenberg.
The main engagement radar is at Beale Air Force Base, near Sacramento, but the test will allow two seaborne tracking systems - a naval radar aboard an Aegis destroyer and one, called an X-band radar, atop a mobile base the size of an oil platform - to track the attacking missile. But none of that data will be fed into the test.
The previous test, conducted last Sept. 1, was graded a success even by skeptics.
The test was designed specifically to exercise the system's main radar - but the interceptor actually scored a kill on the attacking missile, even though such a hit was not designed to be a goal of that previous test.
After this next scheduled test is completed, the follow-on test, now scheduled for the autumn, will use a mobile radar platform at sea, called an X-band radar, as the primary engagement radar.
http://www.iht.com/bin/print.php?id=5828338
Less than 20 minutes later, if the Pentagon's missile defense system is up to the task, an interceptor will launch from Vandenberg Air Force Base, north of Santa Barbara, to collide with the attacking missile more than 100 miles, or 160 kilometers, above the Earth - and several hundred miles offshore - destroying it by high-speed impact.
Pentagon officials are taking a calculatedly ho-hum attitude toward the test, which already has been delayed by software problems for five months: They say this is just one more in a long sequence of opportunities to validate President George W. Bush's prudent goal of fielding limited missile defenses to shield the United States from attack by a rogue state, such as North Korea or Iran.
But the test comes at a decisive moment on Capitol Hill, as well as in capitals across Europe. Much is riding on this full test of the system, only the second conducted so far.
Skeptics in Congress have been threatening to slash the missile defense budget, and Moscow has warned that relations with Washington could rupture if the United States moves ahead with plans to base the system's interceptors and radars in former Soviet client states.
This month, the House of Representatives cut more than $764 million from the administration's proposed spending on missile defenses in the next financial year. Representative Ellen Tauscher, the California Democrat who is chairwoman of the Armed Services subcommittee on strategic forces, said the House bill deleted money for preparing proposed missile defense sites in Poland and the Czech Republic, and instead focused spending on technologies viewed as having more immediate promise.
"We want the Missile Defense Agency to deal with the near-term threats to the war-fighter, to the American people here, at home, and to our European allies and deployed troops," she said. "Too much of the assets were for the future, for yet-to-be defined science projects."
The House version protected money for three missile defense systems: They are known as the Patriot Advanced Capability 3, the Aegis and the Terminal High-Altitude Area Defense. Those all aim at warheads as they close in on their targets, rather than being designed to strike missiles in space during the middle course of their flight, which is the type of system scheduled for the test this week.
In the Senate, the Armed Services Committee has been debating its own version of the military spending legislation this week. The House bill and what emerges from the Senate will have to be reconciled before both houses of Congress vote on the financial 2008 Defense Department budget, and both Democrats and Republicans say the results from this next missile defense test will weigh heavily as they decide how to cast their ultimate votes on the antimissile portion of the bill.
The administration's diplomatic efforts also moved to a new and higher level this week, State Department officials said. John Rood, assistant secretary of state for international security, was traveling between Warsaw and Prague this week for what one State Department official said was "the start of formal negotiations" to deploy 10 interceptors in Poland and a tracking radar in the Czech Republic.
In a subtle indication of the scheduled time and place for the next test, the military issued an alert for ship captains and airplane pilots in the territory to be used, with the alert in effect Thursday between 8 a.m. and noon Pacific Daylight Time.
Military meteorologists already were warning of foul weather. Safety rules require that the attacking missile, to be launched from Kodiak Island, be visible to monitors who can push a destruct button if it veers off course after take-off.
Richard Lehner, spokesman for the Missile Defense Agency, said that even though a general time and general location for the test this week will be known to operators of the missile interceptor, "This will be as realistic as it can be, based upon what we are allowed to do within various safety regulations."
That does not satisfy skeptics.
"The test is highly choreographed, and much simpler than what the system would face in a real battle engagement and in a real threat environment," said Frederick Lamb, a professor of physics and astronomy at the University of Illinois.
Lamb, who conducted a missile defense study for the American Physical Society, expressed concerns that a successful test this week would be cited as proof that "the system has a substantial capability in a real battle situation. That would be a gross exaggeration."
If the test proceeds on Thursday, space satellites will deliver the first alert of the attacking rocket's launch to missile defense operators based in Colorado Springs, the military's headquarters for homeland defense, who will control the interceptor in its silo at Vandenberg.
The main engagement radar is at Beale Air Force Base, near Sacramento, but the test will allow two seaborne tracking systems - a naval radar aboard an Aegis destroyer and one, called an X-band radar, atop a mobile base the size of an oil platform - to track the attacking missile. But none of that data will be fed into the test.
The previous test, conducted last Sept. 1, was graded a success even by skeptics.
The test was designed specifically to exercise the system's main radar - but the interceptor actually scored a kill on the attacking missile, even though such a hit was not designed to be a goal of that previous test.
After this next scheduled test is completed, the follow-on test, now scheduled for the autumn, will use a mobile radar platform at sea, called an X-band radar, as the primary engagement radar.
http://www.iht.com/bin/print.php?id=5828338
