A test facility to launch ballistic missile interceptors is being set up on a river island of the Krishna creek in Andhra Pradesh by the Indian Defence research and development organization (DRDO).
This is part of the DRDO’s ballistic missile defence(BMD) project to shoot incoming enemy missiles out of the sky. According to a DRDO source, they had been facing problems in terms of range for the target missile that needs to be intercepted at the lower end of the parabolic arc as it enters the atmosphere.
The range DRDO needed is of 1500-2000 kms so that the target missile could have the full flight range and the interceptor can be tested to its full capacity.
There are two varieties of missile interceptors that the DRDO has been developing. The first is for an endo-atmospheric interceptor called the AAD, which intercepts a long range after it enters the earth’s atmosphere at the terminal stage of the flight phase. The other is the exo-atmospheric PAD system that seeks to kill the target missile at the farthest distance possible from its target.
The DRDO has undertaken 7 tests, all of them inconclusive in proving them efficacy of the home grown BMD system. Ballistic missile interception is test-intensive and the DRDO has had to develop all the technology virtually from scratch.
