USS LAKE ERIE CREW WILL TAKE FIRST SHOT AT ERRANT SATELLITE

Posted 02.20.08 Stripersonline.com

USS LAKE ERIE CREW WILL TAKE FIRST SHOT AT ERRANT SATELLITE: The crew of the USS Lake Erie will have the responsibility of firing the missile the Pentagon hopes will demolish a wayward spy satellite and its fuel tank of hydrazine, a Navy official said yesterday. The attempt to knock out the National Reconnaissance Office satellite will likely occur this week. Joining the Lake Erie will be the guided missile destroyer the USS Decatur and the USS Russell.

The Lake Erie will take the first shot, the Navy official noted. In the coming days, the Lake Erie will fire a Standard Missile-3 (SM-3) equipped with a Kinetic Kill Vehicle (KKV). Using its Infrared seeker, the KKV will home in on the satellite and hopefully hit the satellite's fuel tank which is filled with hydrazine.

But unlike traditional ballistic missile tests where ballistic missiles give off a heat signature, shooting down an out of control satellite required modifications to both Lockheed Martin's Aegis weapon system and Raytheon's SM-3, the Navy official said. "This event, I think, is pretty significant in terms of technical requirements. We are looking at a cold body in space, a body that has been shut down for some time and it doesn't have the traditional heating up that a traditional ballistic missile has," the official said. "It is moving at a speed that is a lot faster than previous engagements we have made. There are differences that will occur here that don't make this business as usual."

Additionally, the Navy had to come up with new methods to track the satellite, he added. In a six week timeframe, a government-industry team of scientists, engineers and program officials assessed the problem, developed solutions, employed those fixes, tested the fixes in computer simulation and came up with a plan, the Navy official said. "It is a phenomenal achievement in and of itself that in six weeks they could do that."

Although it will be the SM-3 that ultimately destroys the missile, the Navy official also praised the Aegis weapon system that will control the missile flight. "[i] don't know that we have found its limits yet. We continue to find new mission areas and new capabilities," he said of the Aegis system. "To do ballistic missile defense is the latest. We have taken that radar capability ... we always knew it could see deep into space ... and have tied it to an interceptor that is able to match the abilities of medium range and below ballistic missiles."

The Navy official reiterated that the software upgrades to enable the Aegis weapon system and the SM-3 to track and destroy the NRO satellite will not be incorporated into the Navy's ballistic missile defense program. In fact, should the first missile hit its target, the two extra missiles will be put back to their original BMD configuration, the official added.

(Geoff Fein, Defense Daily – 2/20)