WASHINGTON — The first test of a national missile defense system in two years failed Wednesday when the "kill vehicle" never got off the ground.
If the $85-million test had succeeded, the Bush administration was expected to use it as proof of the viability of the system. Instead, the failure gives critics new grounds to be skeptical of the technically challenging and costly program.
The missile interceptor is intended to be part of a multi-layered system meant to protect the nation from a missile attack.
It was the latest in a series of setbacks for the program, which has been ongoing since the Reagan administration and which President Bush pushed to the forefront of his national security plans in May 2001. His goal was to have a limited system in place by the end of this year.
Officials said Wednesday that the inability to complete the test did not represent a failure of the system, but only a technical mishap that could be remedied.
But the developments made it clear that debate would continue over the feasibility of a system that by some accounts has cost $130 billion and is scheduled to tally $50 billion more over the next five years.
Analysts said that in an era of tight budgets and a reduction in the threat of ballistic missile attacks on the United States, it was increasingly likely that congressional and other critics of the antimissile program would seek to shift money away from it.
Much of the design work on the interceptor has been done in California.
Chicago-based Boeing Co. is the lead contractor and has 500 engineers working on the project in Anaheim. Raytheon Co. built many of the sensors, radar and targeting equipment at its electronic systems unit in El Segundo.
Wednesday's two-part test called for the interceptor to be launched from the Ronald Reagan Test Site on the Kwajalein Atoll in the Central Pacific and a target missile to be fired from Kodiak, Alaska. If successful, the so-called kill vehicle would pass close enough to the target rocket to destroy it.
The target missile was fired at 12:45 a.m. EST without event, but the interceptor never left its silo. Twenty-three seconds before it was to launch, a safety sensor detected an unknown problem and shut the system down, said Richard Lehner, a spokesman for the Pentagon's Missile Defense Agency.
"It means that the president is not going to fulfill his promise to open a facility in 2004. This was his last chance," said Joseph Cirincione of the Carnegie Foundation, a nonprofit organization.
