Four seconds after its launch on Monday, a U.S. military hypersonic weapon was destroyed after controllers detected a problem with the system, the Pentagon said. The weapon is part of a program to create a missile that will destroy targets anywhere on Earth within an hour of getting data and permission to launch.
The mission, which was test ranged at the Kodiak Launch Complex in Alaska and occurred shortly after 4 a.m. EDT (0800 GMT) , was aborted to ensure the safety of public, said Maureen Schumann, a spokeswoman for the U.S. Defense Department, adding that no one was injured in the incident.
The launch facility suffered an undetermined amount of damage, Schumann said. "We had to terminate. The weapon exploded during takeoff and fell back down in the range complex," she added.
But Monday's failure did not mean much and would not lead to the program's termination, Riki Ellison, founder of the nonprofit Missile Defense Advocacy Alliance, said. "This is such an important mission and there is promise in this technology," he said.
However, "it was a setback for the U.S. program, which some analysts see as countering the growing development of ballistic missiles by Iran and North Korea but others say is part of an arms race with China, which tested a hypersonic system in January," Reuters reported.
Anthony Cordesman, a defense analyst at the Center for Strategic and International Studies think tank, said the technology was best suited for use against smaller, less-developed countries with missiles, according to Reuters. "The United States has never assumed that these ... are going to be systems that you can use against a power like China by themselves," he said. "For a country like Iran or North Korea, they could be a very significant deterrent."
With some viewing it as an effective tool against terrorists, the mission had reportedly never been cleared by the Pentagon, James Acton, a defense analyst at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, said.
While hypersonic weapons are unlikely to be fielded for a decade, Acton said the fact that Washington and Beijing were both testing the weapons indicated there was a real potential for an arms race. "I believe the U.S. program is significantly more sophisticated than the Chinese program," he said.
However, no conclusions could be drawn about the weapon based on Monday's accident because the launcher detonated before the glide vehicle could be deployed, Acton said.
Known as the Advanced Hypersonic Weapon and developed by Sandia National Laboratory and the U.S. Army, the weapon includes a glide body mounted on a three-stage, solid-propellant booster system known as STARS, for Strategic Target System, Schumann said.
Meanwhile, the craft had successfully flown from Hawaii to the Kwajalein Atoll in the Marshall Islands in a previous test in November 2011. On Monday, it was supposed to fly from Alaska to the Kwajalein Atoll.
