Ukraine Is Testing Missile Defense at the Edge of Space. The Hard Part Comes Next

Ukraine says it has conducted three tests of systems designed to intercept ballistic missiles in space. The engineering challenge is enormous.

A Terminal High Altitude Area Defense (THAAD) interceptor is launched from the Pacific Spaceport Complex Alaska in Kodiak, Alaska, during Flight Test THAAD (FTT)-18 on July 11, 2017. During the test, the THAAD weapon system successfully intercepted an air-launched intermediate-range ballistic missile (IRBM) target. Public domain

Hey friends,

I’m beginning to suspect Ukrainian engineers have a pathological inability to accept the word “impossible.”

Over the past four years, they’ve turned Soviet-era aircraft into Western missile carriers, built naval drones that can shoot down Russian fighter jets, and transformed relatively inexpensive flying machines into a serious threat to the Russian military. And that’s just the stuff we’re aware of…

Now they’re working on something even more ambitious: Shooting down ballistic missiles in space. I mean, if anyone can do it under wartime pressure, my money is on Ukraine.

According to a November 8 report in The Guardian, Ukraine has conducted three tests of what officials describe as exo-atmospheric interception systems. Some involved weapons launched from aircraft flying at very high altitudes.

Fedir Venislavskyi, a member of Ukraine’s parliamentary defense committee, confirmed the effort and told the newspaper that Ukraine had already demonstrated launches of these systems and was investigating whether they could enter production.

I read that twice, because buried in that announcement is a remarkable development, along with an engineering problem that has humbled some of the wealthiest defense contractors on Earth. You know who I’m talking about… The primes who swim in their Scrooge McDuck-sized money vaults daily.

Ukraine is experimenting with weapons capable of reaching the part of a ballistic missile’s flight that takes place above Earth’s atmosphere… AKA in space.

That’s where Russia’s Oreshnik intermediate-range ballistic missile spends the middle part of its journey toward Ukraine. And it’s where the world’s most sophisticated missile-defense systems attempt to launch another missile into space and deliberately crash it into the incoming warhead.

At several kilometers per second… (It’s hard to communicate emotion in written text, so just know that I’m incredulous!)

The scope of this problem was explained moderately well in the movie A House of Dynamite by Kathryn Bigelow.

Once you start talking about intercepting warheads in the vacuum of space, the engineering goes to batshit crazy expert-mode.