Interceptor missile to take on ICBMs
Multiple Kill Vehicle in simulated action.
(Credit: U.S. Missile Defense Agency)Lockheed Martin said this week it has reached an important milestone in the development of one piece of the U.S. Ballistic Missile Defense System (PDF) puzzle: an interceptor missile capable of taking out multiple enemy ICBM warheads.
The U.S. Missile Defense Agency's Multiple Kill Vehicle-L would be launched as a single interceptor equipped with a multiple-kill payload that doesn't bother with the single warhead--it goes after an entire "threat cluster" instead.
It's designed to destroy not only the enemy's re-entry vehicle (intercontinental ballistic missile) but also all the warheads it may contain, including the fake ones meant to deceive U.S. defenses.
The Sunnyvale, Calif.-based defense contractor said it has calibrated the pathfinder seeker, a component that, along with in-flight targeting data, will ultimately enable the weapon to attack and destroy large numbers of objects in the threat cluster. It plans to build two operational prototype seekers, each with a state-of-the-art infrared plane array. One will be mounted on an aircraft to test missile-seeking ability in a flight environment next year; the other will be used in the laboratory to demonstrate the engagement of multiple targets.
"Completion of this milestone validates the design and core technology required for tracking and discriminating targets," Lockheed Martin program director Rick Reginato said in a press release. "This effort involved the development of telescopes, structures, electronics and software to meet the challenging requirements of mid-course threat sensing." The program could come on line by 2017.
Mark Rutherford is a West Coast-based freelance writer. He is a member of the CNET Blog Network, and is not an employee of CNET. Email him at markr@milapp.com. Disclosure. 
- by Jurph May 25, 2008 11:38 AM PDT
- Mark, a few corrections about your terminology.
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(3 Comments)"Payload" is everything the enemy missile has loaded on the front end. This includes any post-boost vehicle, any countermeasures, and any reentry vehicles. All missiles carry some payload. A benefit of MKV is that you don't have to discriminate between the RV and the countermeasures -- you just kill anything that moves.
"Reentry Vehicles" are the long cone-shaped objects designed to re-enter the atmosphere. Any missile that leaves the atmosphere (almost all of them!) and separates its payload form the booster will have at least one reentry vehicle, or possibly more. The "possibly more" part is another benefit of MKV: whether the enemy deploys 1,2,3, or more RVs, MKV should be able to hit all of them.
"Warhead" is the explosive (or nuclear) device inside the reentry vehicle. Only the Russians refer to the entire payload as a warhead, due to a quirk of their language, and since the START treaty they've used the term "front section" instead.
So your sentence "t's designed to destroy not only the enemy's re-entry vehicle (intercontinental ballistic missile) but also all the warheads it may contain, including the fake ones meant to deceive U.S. defenses" would be better written as follows.
[MKV] is designed to destroy the enemy's entire ICBM payload: not just the reentry vehicles and their warheads, but also any decoys or countermeasures meant to deceive US defenses.