Missile Defense Test Succeeds, Pentagon Says, Amid Tensions With North Korea
Source: New York Times
An upgraded American interceptor rocket collided with a mock intercontinental ballistic missile on Tuesday afternoon in the skies over the Pacific Ocean, the Pentagon said, marking the first successful test of whether the Defense Department could shoot down a warhead from North Korea heading toward the continental United States at speeds approaching true battle conditions.
At a time when tensions with North Korea are running high, the successful test gave the Defense Department’s beleaguered missile defense program a victory — the ability to say that it is making strides in protecting the United States from a nuclear warhead that could be launched from a mountainside in North Korea. With the test on Tuesday, five of the last 10 tests have at least partly succeeded.
The test “demonstrates that we have a capable, credible deterrent against a very real threat,” said Vice Adm. James D. Syring, the director of the Pentagon’s Missile Defense Agency, calling the test a “critical milestone for this program.”
But while Defense Department officials said initial indications showed that the test met its primary objective by hitting the target, they provided no details. The department will continue to evaluate other data to determine how the system performed over all. The test on Tuesday was against a single missile, but the North Koreans have begun to practice shooting multiple missiles at a time in an effort to confuse American defenses.
Read more: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/05/30/us/politics/missile-defense-test-north-korea.html
= new reply since forum marked as read
when hominids starting throwing rocks at one another. 
The system’s interceptors are 60-foot-tall, three-stage rockets, each tipped with a 5-foot, 150-pound “kill vehicle.”
Once in space, the kill vehicles are designed to separate from their boost rockets and fly independently toward their targets, at speeds up to 4 miles per second. With the help of onboard navigation systems, the kill vehicles, which carry no explosives, are supposed to crash into and destroy enemy warheads using only kinetic energy.
During the test conducted by the MDA in cooperation with the U.S. Air Force 30th Space Wing, an ICBM-class target was launched from the Reagan Test Site on Kwajalein Atoll in the Republic of the Marshall Islands, according to an MDA statement released shortly after the test.
A ground-based interceptor was launched from Vandenberg Air Force Base, California. As designed, “its exo-atmospheric kill vehicle intercepted and destroyed the target in a direct collision,” the statement reads.
The system is, as of now, comprised of 36 ground-based interceptors buried at Fort Greely, Alaska, and Vandenberg. The MDA will finish fielding all 44 interceptors by the end of 2017
http://www.defensenews.com/articles/direct-collision-for-us-homeland-missile-defense-interceptor-test-against-icbm-target
