Raytheon’s system involves several calmly named “kill vehicles,” which are rocket-launched missile hunters. As designed, they are fired into space to stop ballistic missiles. Once there, the kill vehicle is designed to track the weapon and then destroy it by physical collision. This is done chiefly by Raytheon’s Exoatmospheric Kill Vehicle. It works together with the Standard Missile-3, and Raytheon boasts that together the Exoatmospheric Kill Vehicle and the Standard Missile-3 have a “combined record of 35 successful intercepts in space.” In addition to these two vehicles, Raytheon is working on a “Redesigned Kill Vehicle”, which is in function and purpose supposed to be a cheaper and better kill vehicle than its first one. With a contract awarded in August of this year, Raytheon is also working on a weapon called the “Multi-Object Kill Vehicle”, which is built to destroy several missiles in space. It’s an ambitious goal, trying to technologically outwit the apocalypse, but it’s also one with a long history of expensive failure. Part of it is just that the task itself is really hard. Another challenge is that Congress has weird demands, like “it is important to redesign the Exo-atmospheric Kill Vehicle using a rigorous acquisition approach, including realistic testing.” Finally, there’s an inherent danger in the logic of the system itself. Yousaf Butt, a professor at the James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies, wrote for the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, that There’s a very real chance that such a weapon system, rather than preventing nuclear armageddon, could instead invite it. Which makes any new Star Wars system a lot more like the film than we previously thought.
