The U.S. Air Force launched its second unarmed Minuteman III test in the early hours of Wednesday morning from Vandenberg Space Force Base in California, ramping up dry runs for the land-based nuclear-launch vehicle following a pause after Russia’s second invasion of Ukraine in late February.
The test launch, which took place at 4:13 a.m. Eastern time, was scheduled “years in advance,” the Air Force said in a press release. The exercise was an operational test launch, the primary objective of which was to ensure that a missile randomly selected from a silo in the U.S. heartland functioned as intended.
The Air Force also conducts Minuteman III launches intended to test improvements made by the National Security Administration (NNSA) to the non-nuclear portions of the missile’s nuclear warhead. These are known as developmental test launches.
Test launches typically send missiles on a 4,200 miles flight from Vandenberg to a part of the Pacific Ocean near the Kwajalein Atoll in the Marshall Islands, some 2,500 miles southwest of Honolulu.
Boeing primed the Minuteman III program. Northrup Grumman is the prime contractor for the Minuteman III replacement, Sentinel. The Air Force formerly called the successor missile the Ground Based Strategic Deterrent.
The service has said it planned to begin Sentinel launches in December of 2023 and field the missile in 2030 or so using W87-0 warheads: W87 warheads from the Minuteman fleet modified for compatibility with the new missile.
The Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory is in charge of the W87-0 program, and the W87-1 program. W87-1 will be the Sentinel’s replacement for the Minuteman III’s W78 warhead. W87-1 will use new pits cast at the Los Alamos National Laboratory’s expanded PF-4 Plutonium Facility, which is supposed to be able to cast multiple war-ready W87-1 pits by fiscal year 2024.
