Hole in the Head Press

Strange Planes

Strange Machines

Chinese Shoot Down Satellite

The rumor is that the Chinese have successfully shot down - or destroyed in orbit - one of their old weather satellites, according to the ArmsControlWonk and Aviation Week.

If they have the capacity to do this on a regular basis, it pretty much puts all of our fancy-smanchy high technology - net-centric - near-real-time intelligence gadgets in real danger.

Who Launched That Missile?

Security Flaws Could Cripple Missile Defense Network

The network that stitches together radars, missile launch sites and command control centers for the Missile Defense Agency (MDA) ground-based defense system has such serious security flaws that the agency and its contractor, Boeing, may not be able to prevent misuse of the system, according to a Defense Department Inspector General’s report.

(More here)

Is that a real missile or some 14 year old hacker?

How the Air Force Got the ICBM

Here's a brief history from Air Force Magazine, about how the Air Force, not the Army or Navy, came to get the ICBMs.

Modern Day Texas Towers

In the good old days of the Cold War, we built  "Texas Towers"  off the coasts to alert us of incoming Russian bombers.

Well, happy days are here again. 

Today, we have a new, even more expensive version of the "Texas Tower" and it's about to be floated out to Adak, AK in the Aleutian Islands. The $815 million Raytheon radar will be on the lookout for incoming missiles from out Korea way, I should think.

We've made great progress - we got it down to one ball, and apparently don't need the red checker board pattern any more.  The platform was built by a Russian company.  See, we can all get along after all.

Read about it here.

Cheyenne Mountain Update

Military officials earlier this month turned on the new command center, complete with new hardware, software and big-screen displays, inside the granite-hardened Cheyenne Mountain facility.

The operations center was built to withstand a limited  nuclear strike. The facility is protected by 25-ton steel blast doors and the facility is built on springs that  would help dampen the explosion. The blast doors hadn’t been closed for great length of time since the early 1970s, but they were shut Sept. 11 for almost three hours, the byproduct of a possible threat to the mountainside complex.

The event marks the second operational capability of the Air Force’s $1.5 billion Integrated Space Command and Control (ISC2) program, a 15-year initiative to update the command and control system of Strategic Command and the North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD) to become more interoperable and support the National Command Authority and the Canadian Chief of Defense Staff. The system warns of aircraft, space, ballistic missile and information attacks against North America.

The renovation of the command center, located in Colorado, occurred in two phases. Phase 1, completed by John Bowman Inc., involved construction of the center, a conference room and a meeting room used by the commander and senior staff leaders. Phase 2, performed by Lockheed Martin’s Mission Systems business unit, consisted of the design, purchase and installation of the hardware, software and big-screen displays, according to the NORAD statement.

Last year, Air Force officials flipped the switch on the first of three new computer systems inside Cheyenne Mountain called Air Mission Release 1.

The Navy's Missile Defense Works

September 2004, United States Aegis cruisers that can detect and track ballistic missiles have been on patrol in the Sea of Japan as part of the sea based ballistic missile defense program.

On 24 February, 2005, the U.S.S. Lake Erie tested a Standard Missile-3 (SM-3) missile that intercepted and destroyed a target missile outside of the earth’s atmosphere.

The Navy’s system, hasn't received the publicity that the failure prone Air Force effort at ballistic missile defense has, but the Navy and their contractor's have been been much more successful adopting a system that has been operational for many years.

They have had hit-to-kill successes with the Raytheon designed the sea-based Standard  Missile-3 on Jan. 25, June 13 and Nov. 21, 2002.

Later, in 2005, the first fully operational Aegis sea based BMD system will be deployed on an Aegis destroyer. MDA will conduct rigorous tests, using this initial deployment to integrate the AN/SPY-1 with SM-3 and improve the accuracy of the interceptor.

In 2006, the Navy will deploy nine Aegis ships outfitted with SM-3 missiles and configured to carry out ballistic missile defense operations from almost anywhere in the world.

Thanks to the Navy, we may have an operating missile defense after all.

Cold War Radar Scrapped

It's a dinosaur of the Cold War: a 3-mile-long radar system designed to detect Soviet bombers screaming across the Atlantic.

The Over-The-Horizon Backscatter Radar, often described as the world's largest radar, was developed over 25 years for $1.5 billion and occupies an area nearly twice the size of New York's Central Park. 

The AN/FPS-118 radar was by most accounts the largest radar in the world.

When operational, it could monitor a massive swath of ocean and warn of threats nearly 2,000 miles away.

Built in both Maine and Oregon, the radars picked up readings as far as 1,700 miles off both coasts.

Read more about it here.

Erectile Dysfunction at the MDA

For the second time in several months, our "non-operational"  "test-bed" missile defense failed to rise to the occasion.  The North Koreans are probably not impressed.

In other words, we couldn't get it up as explained here.

Why We Don't Have A Missile That Works

"W'e'll be using the test bed while it's operational, instead of using it as a test bed and then deciding to make it operational," Kadish (pictured) said in 2002. "Instead of waiting to decide ... to turn it on to make it operational, we will attempt to make it operational from the beginning."

If that sounds confusing, read the rest of the story here.