Senior Science Fellow Philip Coyle discusses kill assessments in missile defense with the Los Angeles Times.
“You don’t want to keep shooting at something that’s already dead because you need your ammunition for things that aren’t dead yet,” said Philip E. Coyle III, a missile defense expert who headed Pentagon weapons testing and evaluation from 1994 to 2001.
Each of the new missile defense projects faces significant technical obstacles.
Every new interceptor will have a redesigned kill vehicle at its tip. If they are launched, the kill vehicle is supposed to separate from the three-stage rocket and, aided by an onboard sensor and rocket thrusters, slam into the target at a speed of 4 miles per second. Because of weightlessness in space, that’s much faster than a speeding bullet on Earth. Read more
