It’s the second Minuteman 3 test problem in five weeks at Vandenberg Air Force Base, located on the coast about 130 miles northwest of Los Angeles.
The latest Minuteman 3 missile was launched at 3:01 a.m. (1001 GMT) Wednesday and was destroyed five minutes later because of safety concerns.
Air Force controllers detected “a flight anomaly and terminated the flight for safety reasons,” said Col. Matthew Carroll, 30th Space Wing chief of safety.
“Established parameters were exceeded and controllers sent destruct commands,” Carroll said in a statement. “When terminated, the vehicle was in the broad ocean area northeast of Roi-Namur.” That’s an area near the Kwajalein Atoll in the Marshall Islands, the Air Force said.
There were no details on what went wrong. The Air Force said there will be an investigation.
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.
In that missile test, the ICBM and its re-entry vehicle successfully reached its Kwajalein Atoll target.
The launch command was supposed to have been sent by an E-6B Mercury jet from Offutt Air Force Base, Nebraska, but a communication issue during the countdown required the command to be sent from Vandenberg control instead, the Air Force said.
The E-6B is a four-engine derivative of the Boeing 707 that serves as an airborne command, control and communications platform.
The military regularly tests unarmed ICBMs to test the weapon system’s reliability. The Air Force has about 450 intercontinental ballistic missiles on alert in and around Montana, North Dakota and Wyoming.
