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Launching the new national defense
Virginia Business
January 2005
Star
Wars, that controversial Reagan-era idea that sought
to defend the U.S. against a ballistic missile attack,
is still around but it is different nowadays. It is
less ambitious, cheaper, multilayered and principally
reliant on ground-based technology. And it could soon
be at least partially operational, thanks in large part
to the efforts of Dulles-based Orbital Sciences Corp.,
which is building, among other things, interceptor rockets
for the U.S. Missile Defense Agency.
“If
there is an attack and it’s determined to be hostile
and heading this way, it will be an Orbital rocket that’s
sitting in a silo, on alert and ready to go,”
says Orbital Vice President Barron Beneski.
Orbital, which also supplies target vehicles for testing
the missile defense system, beat out several competitors
in early 2002 for a $900 million, 8-year contract to
develop ground-based, rocket-propelled boost vehicles
that carry the kill vehicles that locate, track and
destroy long-range enemy missiles in flight. While other
firms wanted to build boosters from scratch, Orbital
appealed to the government’s need for speed and
frugality by proposing the use of a modified version
of the technology it had already developed for commercial
space launch vehicles. “Not only was there very
little research and development needed, but it was pretty
much guaranteed to work, since we’d already used
that technology to launch 30 or 40 satellites,”
Beneski says.
Orbital is on track to produce 20 interceptor rockets
by the end of 2005 and have them installed in silos
in California and Alaska. Meanwhile, the company recently
built and launched two more target vehicles.
While Orbital is clearly good for missile defense, missile
defense is also good for Orbital. In just three years,
the firm’s revenue has jumped more than 62 percent,
from $415 million in 2001 to a projected $675 million
in 2004.
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