Previous failures of these high-profile, $85 million US test launches have been regarded as significant setbacks by critics of the program.
In Monday's test, the interceptor was to target a mock missile fired from Kodiak Island, Alaska. The target missile launched at 1:22 a.m. ET without any problems, but the interceptor did not launch.
The previous test, on Dec. 15, failed under almost identical circumstances.
Military officials blamed that failure on fault-tolerance software that was oversensitive to small errors in the flow of data between the missile and a flight computer.
The officials said they would decrease the sensitivity in future launches to avoid the software shutting down the launch again.
Before the Dec. 15 launch, it had been two years since a test.
The program had succeeded five out of eight times in previous attempts to intercept a target.
No date for the next test has been announced.
[And Roy White submitted this link to us as well - Dr. C]
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