The IFT-13B launch Jan. 27 marks the first flight of a new booster designed by Orbital Sciences Corporation. The booster carries the exo-atmospheric kill vehicle and simulates an intercept using a mock EKV.

Photo Source: US Army Space and Missile Defense Command

Maybe I should call this article Weapons That Should Never Have Been Built. I just can't understand why any country would spend billions of dollars installing a system that doesn't work, may never work and is of limited capacity? Who is profiting from this? Someone has to be because it seems just too unbelievable to install such a piece of junk at such an expense. My goodness we could have fixed the medicare drug program with this massive amount of money. Failure after failure of tests has made us look like fools. What kind of deterrent is this? Let me ask you, what kind of excuse is, "we will fix it later"? Lets get it into place right now is the official line. What if I tried to sell the airlines a plane that didn't fly would they buy it? What if I told them I will get it to fly some time in the future, would that make any difference? I would like to know why it has to be installed before it is fixed? Better yet I would like to know why we keep throwing billions of dollars at it when it can be defeated so easily even if it works. Missiles hitting missiles are not the answer right now. We need something that can shoot down many missiles at once, something like a broad band laser. I would like all my readers to understand that I am certainly not against missile defense, but I believe we need one that works and is capable of shooting down anything that is thrown at us meaning we also need a system that can't be overwhelmed. We need something that will put up an impenetrable wall of energy or material in front of incoming missiles and this is what we should be working on. Unfortunately all these weapons are political. Many times in our history we have opted for a weapon because it was the one being built in the more powerful Senator's district or the more powerful Congressman backed it.

The last two missile tests were something to behold. The interceptor missiles didn't even fire. That's right, they never left the ground. But guess what, we are being told this is a good thing and it means that it wasn't the guidance system that malfunctioned. Well like an old boss of mine used to say, it isn't a bad thing, it is a bad bad thing. Its just that it is a different bad thing. Why is it that everything that goes wrong politically is said to be good? That old twist is always in place. I wish the American public was given more credit for brains. We citizens are not stupid even though our government may perceive us to be. I was always taught to admit your mistakes. Can you imagine if you were a kid and went home to your father after failing a test and telling him it was a good thing because it will make you study harder? This would probably be cause for the old boot in the butt. So why doesn't that happen here? Why isn't the program getting the proverbial boot in the butt, it should be?

Every time a test launch is made it cost 85 million dollars but this is chump change for this system. I would like to know if the launch failure isn't a serious flaw, how come it is the second time in a row that the exact same thing has happened, why wasn't it fixed after the first time? I would also like to know how not getting the bird into the air isn't serious? They are planting these thing all around at huge expense and they have never had a Real Test. What I mean by that in the tests that took place, the interceptor already knew where the missile was coming from and its exact course.

Alaska already has 6, now don't laugh, operational sites but the Pentagon is saying that they are not operational because mechanical blocks are in place, but once removed they would be operational. I guess the blocks are being used to save face because everyone knows the missiles don't work very well, if at all. There are 2 more in California with 10 more going into Alaska this year. This is like some type of bad joke. The administration is looking for European partners so it can build this system in Europe. What I don't understand is if the design is available to everybody then all the flaws in the system can be exploited. Many scientists will agree that the technology for this type of defense is unproven. The military says that some defense is better than none. But what kind of defense do you have if missiles don't fire and when they do they miss their targets? Wouldn't it be better if you shot down a missile with a laser from a satellite? Maybe we should be looking at perfecting that technology, it does seem to be more sensible on the surface.

The Pentagon's top independent weapons tester wrote a letter on May 17, 2004 stating that realistic testing of ground based midcourse defense was premature and he also testified in March 2004 that he didn't know if the system would ever be capable of countering ballistic missiles launched by Korea. Hey this means that the system was not even ready to be tested. The tests went on anyway. As I stated before with all of the data of the incoming missile already know to the interceptor, it missed 3 out of 8 tries up to 2004. In real life the misses would have been much higher. I have to wonder if we even would have hit an incoming missile this way. In the tests the target and the interceptor fly the same trajectories in every test. This is like getting the answers to a test in school and still failing. There is another system called the Aegis Ballistic Missile Defense. It did a little better but the test were tilted in favor of the system. The targets were larger and slower to make them easier to hit. In December 2003 the test were suspended because it was found that the interceptor couldn't maneuver very well. By the way the total cost of the missile defense system is 1 Trillion by 2030 for an unworking system, quite a bargain isn't it? Another thing that I should mention is that the infrared satellite system that would track incoming missiles and guide the interceptors is not scheduled to be put into orbit for many years. The General Accounting Office stated that the Pentagon was combining 10 crucial technologies into a missile defense system without knowing if they can handle the task.