Anti-Missle Passes Test at Sea

We give the missile defense program a pretty hard time around here, especially when they don't even manage to pass their own dumbed-down tests. So give the Star Wars crowd some credit: one of their interceptors successfully downed a mock warhead on Thursday. It's "the fifth success in six such tests of the fledgling U.S. anti-missile shield's sea-based leg," according to Reuters. The ground-based component of the missile shield has, obviously, not performed nearly as well.
The target rocket was fired from the U.S. Pacific Missile Range Facility at Barking Sands, Kauai, and was hit a few minutes later from a Standard Missile-3 interceptor fired from the USS Lake Erie guided missile cruiser. The ship used the Aegis Ballistic Missile Defense Weapon System to track the target. By year's end, the U.S. Navy wants 18 ships equipped with the system, Defense Daily notes. [from DefenseTech.org]