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WASHINGTON: Boeing Co. on Monday said its complex system to defend against enemy missile attacks proved more reliable than expected and required less maintenance when it went on alert for a prolonged period last summer before a series of North Korean missile tests.
“We're ready to defend the nation,” Scott Fancher, vice president and program director of the system, said of the ground-based midcourse (GMD) missile defense system Boeing is developing for the Pentagon.
The system was built to intercept and destroy enemy long-range ballistic missiles during the midcourse phase of their flight. It went on alert before the North Korean missile tests for “much longer than it had ever been before,” Fancher said, although he declined to give an exact timespan.
“The system was much more robust than we had hoped,” he said, referring to its software and memory banks.
The U.S. missile defense system was never engaged because North Korea's long-range Taepodong 2 missile fell harmlessly into the Sea of Japan shortly after its launch.
Boeing, prime contractor for $13 billion system, was quickly able to correct the few issues that did arise, including memory buffers filling up, he said.
Increased investment by the Missile Defense Agency over the past two years will give the system a “fairly significant” capacity by the end of the year to simultaneously continue testing and keep the system operational, he said.
By the end of 2008, it should reach full capacity for simultaneous test and operation, he said.
Those efforts were less focused on adding new capabilities, but beefing up communications systems to allow isolation of the two strands of messages required for testing and operations.
Pat Shanahan, vice president and general manager for Boeing Missile Defense Systems, said he expected Boeing's contract as the prime contractor for GMD to be renewed after it ends at the end of fiscal year 2008, given the company's performance.
Boeing also was exploring other uses of the missile defense technologies — including a possible response to enemy attacks on U.S. satellites. “The technology clearly has broader implications, and we are working on that,” Shanahan said. He declined to give any details.
Missile Defense Agency spokesman Rick Lehner said Boeing's good performance earned it $234 million in award fees in 2006, about 94 percent of what was available. Delays the previous year had cost Boeing $107 million in award fees, he said.
Fancher said three ground tests and three flight tests of the midcourse defense system were planned in 2007, including two that will test the tracking capability of the Sea-Based X-Band Radar, a huge radar set on an oil industry platform.
In the third test, the floating radar will actually be the primary radar that decides how to engage the enemy missile.
In addition, Boeing was conducting a study for the Missile Defense Agency about how to modify the current three-stage interceptor rockets into shorter-range two-stage rockets that could be used in Europe, Fancher said.
Lehner said the interceptors needed to travel shorter distances to intercept possible missiles from Iran.
Boeing also was continuing work on an Airborne Laser (ABL), a high energy laser that sits aboard a modified Boeing 747 to hit ballistic missiles that could be fired by North Korea and Iran, said Greg Hyslop, program director for the ABL.
He said the system, developed at a cost so far of about $3.5 billion, would mark “a huge leap in modern warfare.” The laser would be fired in the air for the first time in late fiscal 2007, targeting moving and stable ground targets.
A planned shootdown using the ABL on a mock enemy ballistic missile shortly after its launch was pushed back six months to 2009 due to issues with controlling the laser's beam.
