An unarmed Minuteman 3 intercontinental ballistic missile was destroyed over the Pacific Ocean early Wednesday, minutes after it blasted out of a California coast underground silo on a flight to test the weapon's reliability, the Air Force said.
It's the second Minuteman 3 test problem in five weeks at Vandenberg Air Force Base, located about 130 miles (209 kilometers) north-west of Los Angeles. The latest Minuteman 3 missile was launched at 3:01 am Wednesday and was destroyed five minutes later because of unspecified safety concerns. Designed to carry a nuclear warhead, the three-stage intercontinental ballistic missile has a range of more than 6,000 miles (9,655 kilometers). It travels to approximately 15,000 mph (24,139 kph) at an altitude of 700 miles (1,126 kilometers).
Air Force controllers detected "a flight anomaly and terminated the flight for safety reasons," said Colonel Matthew Carroll, chief of safety for Vandenberg's 30th Space Wing. "Established parameters were exceeded and controllers sent destruct commands," Carroll said in a statement. "When terminated, the vehicle was in the broad ocean area north-east of Roi-Namur."
Roi-Namur is an island in the northern part of the Kwajalein Atoll in the Marshall Islands, some 4,200 miles (6,758 kilometers) from Vandenberg. There were no details on what went wrong and a Vandenberg spokesman said there won't be any further information until Thursday. The Air Force said there will be an investigation.
The Minuteman program is part of the nation's strategic deterrent forces controlled by the Air Force Global Strike Command at Montana's Barksdale Air Force Base. Lieutenant Colonel Ronald Watrous, the program director, didn't immediately return a telephone message Wednesday. On June 22, an unarmed Minuteman 3 was launched on a test flight to the Marshall Islands atoll, but a communications problem forced the launch command to be issued by ground control rather than an airborne launch control system.
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