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15 December 2004 |
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http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/low/world/americas/4097267.stm |
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The Pentagon said an interceptor missile did not take off and was automatically shut down on its launch pad in the central Pacific. A target missile carrying a mock warhead had been fired 16 minutes earlier from Kodiak Island in Alaska. The Pentagon is spending $10bn a year on the missile system, which was meant to be in operation by the end of 2004. The Missile Defence Agency said an "unknown anomaly" was to blame for the system shutting down. A spokesman said officials would now study data from the launch site at Kwajalein Atoll, in the Marshall Islands, to establish what went wrong. In earlier tests, target missiles have been successfully intercepted in five out of eight attempts. Wednesday's trial had been put off four times because of bad weather at launch sites and, on Sunday, because a radio transmitter failed. A Pentagon spokesman told Reuters news agency the test had not been tied to the question of when the national missile defence system would be declared operational. Philip Coyle, chief weapons tester under former US President Ronald Reagan, told Reuters: "This is a serious setback for a programme that had not attempted a flight intercept test for two years." The goal, announced by US President George W Bush in 2002, was to have a basic ground-based shield in place by the end of this year. The last test, in December 2002, failed when the interceptor missile did not separate from its booster rocket. The programme has been nicknamed "son of Star Wars" after the original Strategic Defence Initiative - or "Star Wars" - outlined by President Reagan in the 1980s.
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13 December 2004 |
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http://www.abc.net.au/news/newsitems/200412/s1264356.htm |
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The US Missile Defence Agency has once again postponed a planned missile defence flight test, this time due to the failure of a radio transmitter at the test range site in the Pacific, a spokesman said. The agency has been trying to conduct the test, which would be the first of its kind in two years, since the middle of last week, but has already put it off three times due to bad weather at launch sites. "The missile defence test planned for (Sunday) evening has been postponed due to a malfunction of test range safety equipment at Kwajalein Atoll," said Rick Lehner of the Missile Defence Agency. "Contingent on acceptable weather and repair of the safety equipment, the test could take place Monday evening (local time)." Mr Lehner said a radio transmitter used to send signals to missiles in flight was not working. "I want to emphasise, it's not a part of the missile defence system, just part of the range infrastructure," he said. The plan is for an interceptor missile to be fired from Kwajalein Atoll, in the Marshall Islands, into the path of a target missile launched from Kodiak Island, Alaska. The test could result in an intercept, but the Missile Defence Agency says the aim is to gather data in preparation for a fully-fledged intercept attempt next March or April. In earlier tests, target missiles have been successfully intercepted in five out of eight attempts, but those have been under artificial conditions using some surrogate components. But since the last test in December 2002, flight tests have been delayed or cancelled six times, adding to questions about the viability of the system. Despite the lack of recent flight tests, President George W Bush is expected to declare the system operational by the end of this year.
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