$50-Million Experiment : ‘Star Wars’ Project Goes to McDonnell Douglas

McDonnell Douglas Astronautics Co. has won a contract valued at about $50 million to launch an unmanned Delta rocket that will carry a key experiment in President Reagan’s “Star Wars” program.

The launch, scheduled for the first quarter of 1989 from Cape Canaveral, Fla., will be the third “Star Wars”-related experiment to be fired into space aboard a McDonnell Douglas Delta rocket, company spokesman Tom Williams said.

McDonnell Douglas Astronautics has “a couple hundred” people working on the so-called Delta Star program at the company headquarters in Huntington Beach and at Cape Canaveral, Williams said.

He would not discuss the objectives of the top-secret Delta Star mission. “The actual payload is still being determined,” he said.

In February, a Delta-launched test of “Star Wars” technology involved testing the ability of sensors used to identify and track simulated enemy targets in space. In that $250-million exercise, a Delta rocket launched a 3-ton military satellite containing sensors and smaller rockets, including four that were to be fired into space to create plumes that would simulate Soviet ballistic missile plumes.

The ability to detect and destroy thousands of incoming Soviet missiles is crucial to the success of President Reagan’s proposed anti-missile defense system, formally named the Strategic Defense Initiative program.

The McDonnell Douglas Astronautics unit is heavily involved in “Star Wars” research. The company has a $331-million contract to design and test a non-nuclear, ground-based missile that would intercept and destroy incoming Soviet missiles within the Earth’s atmosphere. The company is also a subcontractor on several other “Star Wars” contracts, Williams said.

Earlier this year, the astronautics unit lost a $480-million contract to build and launch a particle-beam weapons system. The Pentagon canceled the program because of cuts in the Strategic Defense Initiative budget.