Why Drones Could Be the Future of Missile Defense

An anonymous reader writes "With North Korea's failed missile launch Friday, it is clear many nations around the globe are attempting to acquire missiles that can carry larger payloads and go further. Such moves have made the United States and its allies very nervous. Missile defense has been debated since the 1980's with such debate back once again the headlines. Most missile defense platforms have technical issues and are very expensive. One idea: use drones instead. '... a high-speed (~3.5 to 5.0 km/s), two-stage, hit-to-kill interceptor missile, launched from a Predator-type UAV can defeat many of these ballistic missile threats in their boost phase.' Could a Drone really take down a North Korea missile? 'A physics-based simulator can estimate the capabilities of a high-altitude, long endurance UAV-launched boost-phase interceptor (HALE BPI) launched from an altitude of approximately 60,000 feet. Enabled by the revolution in UAVs, this proposed boost-phase interceptor, based on off-the-shelf technology, can be deployed in operationally feasible stations on the periphery of North Korea.'"

Comments

Re:SBX-1

[PPH]

It can track an object the size of a baseball from about 3000 miles away.

How many baseballs can it track at one time? And once it has figured out which are the real baseballs and which are fake*, how quickly interceptors be launched after the real ones?

*The details of which are highly classified. Because dummys and countermeasures are dirt cheap compared to the discrimination technology. Once you know what the SBX-1 is looking for, ICBM payloads can be updated inexpensively. And they are classified because we have publicly demonstrated how well we can see all this space junk. And how well we can shoot a piece of it down. But funding would be at risk should the public realize that an important piece in the middle is missing.