Team Infidel
Forum Spin Doctor
U.S. News & World Report (usnews.com)
February 25, 2008 A warship's missile hits its target to cheers from the control room
By Anna Mulrine
Capt. R.M. Hendrickson stepped across the deck of the guided missile cruiser USS Lake Erie last Saturday afternoon to a bank of ballistic missile launch tubes, motioning to the particular 2-by-2-foot location from which a missile flew from the ship positioned at the time some 420 miles northwest of Hawaii.
The missile hit its target, destroying a defective intelligence satellite that was falling toward Earth at 17,000 miles per hour. It was unclear where the satellite would have hit had it crashed, most likely into the ocean. But the Pentagon had expressed particular concern about the school bus-size satellite's fuel tank filled with 1,000 pounds of hydrazine—which defense officials soberly described in a news release as "a hazardous fuel which could pose a danger to people on earth."
The USS Lake Erie is a warship equipped with the Navy's sophisticated Aegis weaponry, an advanced radar-based defensive system that is normally used against antiship missiles and other threats. This technology was adapted for the satellite shootdown.
In his stateroom, Hendrickson pops in a video of the missile's launch and of the ship's combat information center at the moment of impact.
The crew describes the launch sound as deafening. "You'll see the first booster falling off," Hendrickson says as he narrates the video. "It just comes right back into the ocean." Seconds later, someone calls out, "Transition! Transition!" This is the signal that the missile is about to reach its target. Those in the control room are quiet for a moment, eyes riveted to the video monitors in front of them.
"Bang!" one operator says, breaking the silence. "Yes! Yes!" shouts another, to cheers, high-fives, and pumped fists.
During a replay, Hendrickson points out where the flames shooting from the missile's afterburners have singed the ship's bell during takeoff. "We haven't shined it yet," he says. "As a reminder."
With the USS Lake Erie now moored at Pearl Harbor in Hawaii, Hendrickson, the ship's commanding officer, spoke with U.S. News about the strike last week hailed by Pentagon officials as a success for the U.S. missile-defense program—and about the criticism that followed from Russia and China that the missile strike was a thinly veiled effort to hone America's antisatellite capabilities.
Excerpts from the interview:
The lead up -- We'd been practicing for a month and a half when we got told we would possibly do the mission and kept working up with a team of government experts and technicians as well as industry partners, the folks that designed the Aegis weapons system and the missile itself, and started tracking the object at different times when we could when we were underway to get radar cross-section data and that sort of thing, which was helping build the eventual program and software that we used to do it.
Obviously, there was a lot of anticipation building up to it. Each time we practiced, each time we tracked, it got better. We went over probably 120, maybe 115 practice runs, what it would look like when we did it.
The hardest part -- It was a little different than our normal ballistic missile shots for a couple of reasons. One, primarily because it's a straight running target versus an up and down [like a ballistic missile], and it was at an incredible speed. The second thing is that normal...shots that we've been doing over the past couple years have been operational in nature, as in only a couple people on the ship know when it's happening. So it's very much a test of the crew and system. Where this time we knew exactly when it was happening, that sort of thing. Probably the hardest part in the whole run-up to it was as it started breaking in the press we were trying to finish our training and we were on our way over to the ammo magazine to load the missiles and then proceed to sea, and I was thankful we got out to sea before it all broke.
Out to sea -- We were out to sea for about a week and a half before the decision was made. Obviously, the morning of, the concern from the senior leadership was that the space shuttle came down and got out of the way. I'm not sure where all of the heavy weather reports came, it was never really heavy weather. But be that as it may, about midmorning we got the order in that the secretary had OK'd the mission, and the ship from that point on was actually very calm. Obviously, the closer it got, there was a lot of anticipation. The firing team was very calm when we did it. With the exception of the whoosh as it went out of the launcher, it was just as we scripted it.... The missile seeker when it opened its eyes had it right dead center, and obviously we hit it at a good strike angle. There was a lot of cheering in combat when we hit it.
Obliterated -- We get something called kinetic warhead, literally images down from space. The last four seconds of the kinetic warhead imagery, you could see it as it got bigger. And the last frame was the last thing the satellite will ever remember. It was pretty big right there on the screen. [The weapons officer] was over by the radar scope, and I was standing right behind him. The radar scope went wild then. It's a very sensitive radar. At that point, there was a lot of debris, a lot of pieces. So we thought we'd had a pretty good impact. That was confirmed by the aircraft that were airborne, the radars ashore, and some other sensors and that it pretty much was obliterated. Over the next three to four hours, quite literally a lot of it burned up as it was coming down, which was the whole goal.
Stressing -- There weren't as many modifications done to the missile as to the Aegis weapons system computer program. One of the nice things about the ballistic missile defense arena that the Navy's been able to do since 1999 is rebuild off existing Aegis weapons system technology and existing standard missile technology to grow that into the ballistic missile arena. We started tackling obviously rudimentary threats to start with. In the first few tests, everybody knew when it was happening. It was unitary targets, those of a single body. Then we went after a separating target. And with each successive test, we told less and less people on board about it, and it became a lot more operational in nature. It also became more stressing. Each of the targets and events became more stressing for the weapons system to push it farther and farther.
'As President Reagan envisioned' -- Clearly, this one, we pushed it way beyond what we ever thought it was supposed to do, both the Aegis system and the missile. The speed of the target was much faster than a typical ballistic missile, for one. The height that the missile had to travel was quite a bit—well, not that much more, a little bit higher...When you do a ballistic missile, the closing velocity, we try to come in at a little bit of shallow angle. There's no explosive on it, it's clearly a bullet hitting a bullet as President Reagan envisioned a number of years ago. This time it was coming so fast that we shot it basically straight on. Just the sheer impact of that speed in space literally obliterated it.
Contractors -- About 35 people on board, a combo of government and technical experts that work on the system all the time, the program verifiers, folks from Lockheed, and folks from Raytheon, which builds the missile. For a typical event, we normally have 15 to 20 on board, so we had a few more. One other thing I would also like to tell you, every time we operate the system since its inception, it's always been Navy sailors operating the consoles. The contractors have never operated the consoles. They didn't this time, either. They were there as more of a double-check, because there were a lot of things in the computer program...they put the patches in on it that opened up some of the parametrics of the weapons system to allow us to track it at that high rate of speed and that kind of altitude. It really was a team effort across the board.
Plan B -- We had a second missile on board. I guess the theory always was that plan A was going to work. Plan B would be we would wait for another shot opportunity had it flown by or had we hit it at a bad angle and the tank was still going to survive. There's this talk of we did it for all kinds of different reasons, and it's just simply not true. We did it for the most altruistic reasons known, which is we knocked it out because we didn't want the tank coming back through the atmosphere and potentially falling on populated areas. There'd never been a tank that big full of hydrazine that had ever re-entered the atmosphere, and I'm not a real expert, but from what people tell me, hydrazine's pretty nasty stuff.
Debris -- From what I heard yesterday, there is not much debris to track...Within the first four hours, there were no pieces much bigger than a football...I don't know whether I can say the number, but it's quite small. There are four stages for the missile. The first booster falls into the ocean. The second stage burns up, the third stage falls off, and the warhead's only that big. It's not coming back here. Nobody's getting any pieces.
February 25, 2008 A warship's missile hits its target to cheers from the control room
By Anna Mulrine
Capt. R.M. Hendrickson stepped across the deck of the guided missile cruiser USS Lake Erie last Saturday afternoon to a bank of ballistic missile launch tubes, motioning to the particular 2-by-2-foot location from which a missile flew from the ship positioned at the time some 420 miles northwest of Hawaii.
The missile hit its target, destroying a defective intelligence satellite that was falling toward Earth at 17,000 miles per hour. It was unclear where the satellite would have hit had it crashed, most likely into the ocean. But the Pentagon had expressed particular concern about the school bus-size satellite's fuel tank filled with 1,000 pounds of hydrazine—which defense officials soberly described in a news release as "a hazardous fuel which could pose a danger to people on earth."
The USS Lake Erie is a warship equipped with the Navy's sophisticated Aegis weaponry, an advanced radar-based defensive system that is normally used against antiship missiles and other threats. This technology was adapted for the satellite shootdown.
In his stateroom, Hendrickson pops in a video of the missile's launch and of the ship's combat information center at the moment of impact.
The crew describes the launch sound as deafening. "You'll see the first booster falling off," Hendrickson says as he narrates the video. "It just comes right back into the ocean." Seconds later, someone calls out, "Transition! Transition!" This is the signal that the missile is about to reach its target. Those in the control room are quiet for a moment, eyes riveted to the video monitors in front of them.
"Bang!" one operator says, breaking the silence. "Yes! Yes!" shouts another, to cheers, high-fives, and pumped fists.
During a replay, Hendrickson points out where the flames shooting from the missile's afterburners have singed the ship's bell during takeoff. "We haven't shined it yet," he says. "As a reminder."
With the USS Lake Erie now moored at Pearl Harbor in Hawaii, Hendrickson, the ship's commanding officer, spoke with U.S. News about the strike last week hailed by Pentagon officials as a success for the U.S. missile-defense program—and about the criticism that followed from Russia and China that the missile strike was a thinly veiled effort to hone America's antisatellite capabilities.
Excerpts from the interview:
The lead up -- We'd been practicing for a month and a half when we got told we would possibly do the mission and kept working up with a team of government experts and technicians as well as industry partners, the folks that designed the Aegis weapons system and the missile itself, and started tracking the object at different times when we could when we were underway to get radar cross-section data and that sort of thing, which was helping build the eventual program and software that we used to do it.
Obviously, there was a lot of anticipation building up to it. Each time we practiced, each time we tracked, it got better. We went over probably 120, maybe 115 practice runs, what it would look like when we did it.
The hardest part -- It was a little different than our normal ballistic missile shots for a couple of reasons. One, primarily because it's a straight running target versus an up and down [like a ballistic missile], and it was at an incredible speed. The second thing is that normal...shots that we've been doing over the past couple years have been operational in nature, as in only a couple people on the ship know when it's happening. So it's very much a test of the crew and system. Where this time we knew exactly when it was happening, that sort of thing. Probably the hardest part in the whole run-up to it was as it started breaking in the press we were trying to finish our training and we were on our way over to the ammo magazine to load the missiles and then proceed to sea, and I was thankful we got out to sea before it all broke.
Out to sea -- We were out to sea for about a week and a half before the decision was made. Obviously, the morning of, the concern from the senior leadership was that the space shuttle came down and got out of the way. I'm not sure where all of the heavy weather reports came, it was never really heavy weather. But be that as it may, about midmorning we got the order in that the secretary had OK'd the mission, and the ship from that point on was actually very calm. Obviously, the closer it got, there was a lot of anticipation. The firing team was very calm when we did it. With the exception of the whoosh as it went out of the launcher, it was just as we scripted it.... The missile seeker when it opened its eyes had it right dead center, and obviously we hit it at a good strike angle. There was a lot of cheering in combat when we hit it.
Obliterated -- We get something called kinetic warhead, literally images down from space. The last four seconds of the kinetic warhead imagery, you could see it as it got bigger. And the last frame was the last thing the satellite will ever remember. It was pretty big right there on the screen. [The weapons officer] was over by the radar scope, and I was standing right behind him. The radar scope went wild then. It's a very sensitive radar. At that point, there was a lot of debris, a lot of pieces. So we thought we'd had a pretty good impact. That was confirmed by the aircraft that were airborne, the radars ashore, and some other sensors and that it pretty much was obliterated. Over the next three to four hours, quite literally a lot of it burned up as it was coming down, which was the whole goal.
Stressing -- There weren't as many modifications done to the missile as to the Aegis weapons system computer program. One of the nice things about the ballistic missile defense arena that the Navy's been able to do since 1999 is rebuild off existing Aegis weapons system technology and existing standard missile technology to grow that into the ballistic missile arena. We started tackling obviously rudimentary threats to start with. In the first few tests, everybody knew when it was happening. It was unitary targets, those of a single body. Then we went after a separating target. And with each successive test, we told less and less people on board about it, and it became a lot more operational in nature. It also became more stressing. Each of the targets and events became more stressing for the weapons system to push it farther and farther.
'As President Reagan envisioned' -- Clearly, this one, we pushed it way beyond what we ever thought it was supposed to do, both the Aegis system and the missile. The speed of the target was much faster than a typical ballistic missile, for one. The height that the missile had to travel was quite a bit—well, not that much more, a little bit higher...When you do a ballistic missile, the closing velocity, we try to come in at a little bit of shallow angle. There's no explosive on it, it's clearly a bullet hitting a bullet as President Reagan envisioned a number of years ago. This time it was coming so fast that we shot it basically straight on. Just the sheer impact of that speed in space literally obliterated it.
Contractors -- About 35 people on board, a combo of government and technical experts that work on the system all the time, the program verifiers, folks from Lockheed, and folks from Raytheon, which builds the missile. For a typical event, we normally have 15 to 20 on board, so we had a few more. One other thing I would also like to tell you, every time we operate the system since its inception, it's always been Navy sailors operating the consoles. The contractors have never operated the consoles. They didn't this time, either. They were there as more of a double-check, because there were a lot of things in the computer program...they put the patches in on it that opened up some of the parametrics of the weapons system to allow us to track it at that high rate of speed and that kind of altitude. It really was a team effort across the board.
Plan B -- We had a second missile on board. I guess the theory always was that plan A was going to work. Plan B would be we would wait for another shot opportunity had it flown by or had we hit it at a bad angle and the tank was still going to survive. There's this talk of we did it for all kinds of different reasons, and it's just simply not true. We did it for the most altruistic reasons known, which is we knocked it out because we didn't want the tank coming back through the atmosphere and potentially falling on populated areas. There'd never been a tank that big full of hydrazine that had ever re-entered the atmosphere, and I'm not a real expert, but from what people tell me, hydrazine's pretty nasty stuff.
Debris -- From what I heard yesterday, there is not much debris to track...Within the first four hours, there were no pieces much bigger than a football...I don't know whether I can say the number, but it's quite small. There are four stages for the missile. The first booster falls into the ocean. The second stage burns up, the third stage falls off, and the warhead's only that big. It's not coming back here. Nobody's getting any pieces.