Thursday night, the Navy says, it moved another step closer to theater-wide defense capability with a successful test flight of the newly developed Standard Missile 3 (SM-3). The cruiser USS Lake Erie conducted the Aegis LEAP intercept flight test, using
Thursday night, the Navy says, it moved another step closer to theater-wide defense capability with a successful test flight of the newly developed Standard Missile 3 (SM-3).
The cruiser USS Lake Erie conducted the Aegis LEAP intercept flight test, using the Pacific Missile Range Facility at Barking Sands.
The test, third in a series of nine, was the first of its kind since last July, when a test of the SM-3 failed after the third and final stage of the missile failed to separate. That test was conducted elsewhere.
If the series of tests is successful, Navy officials believe that the entire Pacific west of California can be covered by this system.
Navy officials said a target was used in Thursday’s test.
According to Defense Daily, a Department of Defense publication, Thursday’s tested missile was “not yet equipped with all of the necessary components to actually hit a target.”
That part of the system won’t be incorporated until the fourth test, slated for June or July of this year. Nine tests in all are scheduled.
The point of Thursday’s test, according to officials, was to fly out the first and second stages and burn the third stage motor and hope it separated, something it didn’t do in the previous test last summer.
Information released Friday by Pacific Missile Range spokeswoman Vida Mossman characterized Thursday’s flight as “successful.”
Rear Admiral Rodney P. Rempt, assistant Chief of Naval Operations for Missile Defense called the test, “a major positive event.”
“It’s time to deliver what we promised on the test range. The engineering data we’ll derive from this test will definitely move us along the SM-3 path to intercept,” Rempt claimed.
Raytheon Missile Systems, of Tucson, Ariz., is the prime contractor for the development and production of the SM-3.
The cost for Thursday’s test was not released.
The next test of the SM-3, planned in June or July, will take place at White Sands Missile Range in New Mexico.
The Navy hasn’t committed to a deployment of the system. Officials say that depends on the results of the nine-test series.
Mossman said she has heard nothing to indicate that the joint Army-Navy missile launches – eight in all, four from PMRF – won’t go off on schedule beginning this summer.
Those launches, using old Polaris motors, are planned for the next five years.
Four of the launches are planned for PMRF and four at an Army installation at Kodiak, Alaska. No exact dates have been released.
Four launches took place at PMRF between 1993 and 1996 at an average cost of $6.75 million each. Protests against the launches were held in the early 1990s, but opposition dwindled as the launches progressed.
Staff writer Dennis Wilken can be reached at 245-3681 (ext. 252) and dwilken@pulitzer.net
