This hardly sounds encouraging.
Bad weather Wednesday forced the military to scrub the first full flight test of its national missile defense system in nearly two years.
“It is just heavy cloud cover,” Rick Lehner, a spokesman for the Missile Defense Agency, said of conditions Wednesday evening off the Alaskan coast.
Is it me, or shouldn’t the defense system work even when it’s cloudy? As my friend Eugene Oregon put it:
Hopefully, once they spend a few billion more dollars on the project, they’ll be able to get the system to work in all weather conditions. Either that or we’ll have to ask people only to lob missiles at us on sunny, cloudless days.
Also disconcerting was word that this $85 million test of a system that’s supposed to shoot down incoming missiles won’t actually measure the system’s success in shooting down incoming missiles.
During the test, a target missile will be launched from Kodiak Island, Alaska, and an interceptor missile will fire from Kwajalein Island in the central Pacific Ocean.
Because the launches will test several new aspects of the missile defense system, Lehner said the interceptor actually shooting down the target is not a primary goal of the mission (emphasis added)
Yeah, I feel safer already.