WASHINGTON, July 14 (Reuters) - The U.S. Defense Department prepared on Saturday for its first flight test in a year of a controversial prototype system to shoot down incoming ballistic missiles after a one-out-of-three success rate so far.
In the $100 million nighttime test over the Pacific Ocean, a (120-pound 54 kg) ``kill vehicle'' will use sensors and thrusters to try to home in on a dummy warhead fired from Vandenberg Air Force in California.
If it succeeds, the target will be destroyed 140 miles (225 km) above the central Pacific, outside the earth's atmosphere, nine minutes and nine seconds after the interceptor blasts off from the Kwajalein Atoll in the Republic of the Marshall Islands, 4,800 miles (7,700 km) away.
The military often equates the challenge to hitting one speeding bullet with another.
Only one of the three previous such tests has ended with a hit. The last flopped on July 8 last year, when defense and civil electronics specialist Raytheon Co.'s. (RTN.N) kill vehicle failed to separate from its booster rocket.
Then-President Bill Clinton, citing test failures, postponed a decision on whether to go ahead with plans for a land-based shield against a limited number of enemy warheads.
President George W. Bush, on the other hand, is rushing to deploy a multilayered shield -- including missiles launched from ships and lasers fired from modified Boeing 747 aircraft. He hopes the deployment will be as early as 2004 to cope with what he calls the growing missile threat from countries like North Korea, Iran and Iraq.
Bracing For Failure
Top Pentagon officials have sought to reduce expectations for Saturday's test, the first in a newly announced, accelerated series that will take place each month or two through at least the end of next year.
``This is one test in a series of tests and if it succeeds, we will gain confidence. And if it fails, we will learn a lot,'' Air Force Lt. Gen. Ronald Kadish, head of the Pentagon's Ballistic Missile Defense Organization, told a Pentagon briefing on Friday.
Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, possibly trying to head off any go-slow push in Congress that might follow another miss, argued against reading too much into whether there is a hit.
With prototypes of an advanced technology, ``a variety of things work properly and a variety of things may not, and more information may be needed,'' he told reporters on July 9. ``And I suspect that that will be the outcome in this instance.''
The test was taking place only three days after the administration told Congress that its missile-defense speedup plan would collide with the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty within months.
The treaty made with the former Soviet Union bars nationwide defenses against long-range missiles and certain kinds of anti-missile testing to head off a race to overwhelm each side's defenses.
Everything on Track
Air Force Lt. Col. Rick Lehner, a missile-defense program spokesman, said the weather appeared fine for the test, which is to take place some time between 10 p.m. EDT (0200 GMT on Sunday) and 2 a.m. EDT (0600 GMT) Sunday.
The window was chosen to minimize the danger to mariners and air traffic, normally reduced at that hour on weekends.
``Every thing seems to be on track,'' said Lehner.
The exact time of the test is dictated by winds and readiness at Kwajalein and Vandenberg Air Force Base, where the environmental group Greenpeace was organizing a protest.
Aerospace giant Boeing Co. (BA.N) is the lead system integrator for U.S. missile defense. Manufacturer TRW Inc. (TRW.N) builds the battle command, control and communications system. Raytheon builds the ``exoatmospheric kill vehicle'' and defense giant Lockheed Martin Corp. (LMT.N) is prime contractor on the current booster system.
Under Clinton, the land-based leg of interceptors, advanced radar posts and battle management stations alone was projected to cost perhaps $60 billion.
The first such flight test, on October 3, 1999, resulted in the successful intercept of a ballistic missile target. The next one, on January 19, 2000, failed due to a clogged cooling pipe on the kill vehicle.
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