$60M to shoot a satellite?

A missile fired from a Navy warship on Wednesday night shot down a U.S. spy satellite that had been malfunctioning 130 miles above the Earth. The price tag for the endeavor has been pegged at upward of $30 million and even as high as $60 million, depending on the news report. Why did it cost so much money to shoot one missile?

They needed to reprogram the weapons. Once the orders were given on Jan. 4 to destroy the satellite, the Department of Defense had just a few weeks to outfit two Navy cruisers—the USS Lake Erie and USS Decatur—with rejiggered Aegis defense systems and a total of three SM-3 missiles. Only one missile was fired on Wednesday, but the other two had to be ready, in case a second or third attempt was needed. Since each SM-3 missile costs $9.5 million, the tab for the munitions alone adds up to almost $30 million.

Customizing the Aegis system and missiles for the satellite mission was a major expense. The technologies were originally designed to intercept ballistic missiles using heat sensors, but the spy satellite was cooler in temperature. To account for this difference, the three SM-3's needed new software, hardware, and sensors, and the launching systems had to be given new sensors and software updates. The bulk of this task would have been assigned to high-priced contractors—like Raytheon, the maker of the missile, or Lockheed Martin, maker of the Aegis system. And it would have taken a large crew of engineers to rewrite the code, debug it, and test it over and over again—all within three weeks. The stakes were also higher than they would be for a commercial software release, as the system had to work perfectly in a 10-second window; there was no opportunity to fix problems with software patches later on. (Before this week's launch, the same anti-missile system had been successful on eight of 10 tries.)