Contact: Phil Hearn
STARKVILLE, Miss.--U.S. Rep. Roger Wicker, R-Miss., said Friday a missile defense system currently under development in Mississippi is badly needed to deter the threat of "nuclear intimidation by some rogue nation's leader."
The six-term lawmaker from Pontotoc told a gathering of government, military, academic, and defense-industry officials that Kinetic Energy Interceptors currently sought by the Pentagon represent "weapons of mass protection" in an uncertain world.
Deputy majority whip and a member of the House Appropriations Defense Subcommittee, Wicker said the Navy has a vital role to play in missile defense.
"Sooner or later--and preferably sooner--we will need to augment our fleet significantly, and we need a more capable interceptor on board," he said during a missile defense conference at Mississippi State University. "The Kinetic Energy Interceptor offers such a capability."
Northrop Grumman Corp.--which operates the former Ingalls shipbuilding facility in Pascagoula--is leading a $4 billion national effort to develop and test a land-based KEI system for the U.S. Missile Defense Agency. Under a $200,000 subcontract, MSU engineers are determining effective ways to launch the defensive missiles at sea.
"MSU's partnership in this effort will enhance our ability to offer the Missile Defense Agency an effective KEI sea-basing capability to significantly increase the robustness of the global-layered ballistic missile defense system," said Craig Staresinich, KEI vice president and general manager of Northrop Grumman Mission Systems.
Wicker spoke during a luncheon session wrapping up the one-day conference on "Mississippi Missile Defense Research and Development: Challenges and Opportunities." The event was sponsored by MSU and its ERC/Computational Simulation and Design Center, and Northrop Grumman.
MSU President Charles Lee welcomed participants to the conference, which was held at the university's Center for Advanced Vehicular Systems. The ERC (formerly known as the Engineering Research Center) is a university-wide institute for computational science and engineering. The SimCenter and CAVS are ERC research centers of the university's Bagley College of Engineering.
Other conference speakers included: Staresinich and William Williston, manager of Advanced Programs for Northrop Grumman; Mike Cantrell of the U.S. Army Space and Missile Defense Command; Sam Reaves of the Missile and Space Intelligence Center; Keith Payne, president of the National Institute for Public Policy; and David Marcum, director of MSU's SimCenter.
"Today's dangers present a complicated picture," Wicker told the assemblage. "The threats are more numerous, more varied, less visible, less predictable.
"In this strange new environment, the case for missile defense is virtually self-evident," he added. "Nothing is more likely to strengthen the hand of a U.S. president in the face of nuclear intimidation by some rogue nation's leader.
"And, in the event of attack, nothing would be more important than the capacity to intercept and destroy nuclear missiles headed for the United States or our allies before they cause untold casualties," the 1st District congressman said.
Marcum, MSU's Billie J. Ball Professor of Mechanical Engineering, said computational fluid dynamics technology developed at the SimCenter will be used "to predict the behavior of the KEI missile and its rocket exhaust during the initial launch sequence from a ship or other sea-based platform."
KEI is being developed to destroy intermediate and long-range enemy missiles during their most vulnerable boost/ascent phase of flight. The interceptors--with a top speed of more than 12,000 miles per hour--are designed to track incoming missile threats and destroy them with a non-explosive kinetic energy warhead.
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For more information, contact Debbie McBride at (662) 325-9333 or dmcbride@gri.msstate.edu.