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| Streaming Missile Defense Tests |
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To try out its weapons, the U.S. military needs some space.
Rifle ranges can be a few miles from populated areas. For tanks, artillery, bombing and Top Gunstyle dog fighting, the Department of Defense has established large military reservations that provides miles and miles of safety barrier.
But the Missile Defense Agency (MDA), charged with testing the ability of a defending missile to bring down an attacking enemy missile in mid-flight, needs a lot more room. Whether the interception is a successful hit-to-kill or a miss (since 2001 MDA’s tests have been about 80 percent successful), what’s left of both missiles need to fall harmlessly into the sea.
So, flight tests take place over hundreds of thousands of square miles of open ocean. A so-called threat-representative target missile might be launched from Kodiak Launch Complex on Kodiak Island, Alaska; and an interceptor might be launched in response from the Ronald W. Reagan Missile Defense Site Vandenberg Air Force Base in California. Interceptors are sometimes launched from ships at sea. The interception takes place somewhere in-between.
Missile defense has been a political hot potato for years. To serve the considerable public interest in their tests, MDA’s public affairs staff are charged with providing news outlets with timely footage documenting the tests from these farflung locations.
Cameras are not a problem; MDA has plenty of them to allow researchers to evaluate all facets of an interception exercise. Real-time and slow motion cameras document the launch of both rockets from a variety of locations. Video is available of the interception itself from airborne HALO (High ALtitude Observatories) aircraft tracking missiles in flight.
"The testing people have cameras that document the event for a variety of reasons,” said Chris Taylor, MDA spokesman. The footage is collected at a single site and put through a security review to make certain that no classified technology is revealed. “Then we take that imagery and decide what we want to use.”
That process can take three to four hours from the actual test. Because that time varies, MDA found it difficult to schedule satellite time that would allow the earliest possible delivery of video to the designated pool network, charged with distributing the video to the rest of the electronic press corps.
“The challenge has always been getting postflight test video from flight test locations to the news media,” said Taylor.
He said the electronic press corps themselves put MDA on to a solution to the video distribution challenge.
“We talked with reporters from Fox and CNN and found they were using Streambox technology for live to tape and live to record from the field. So we did some checking and found this fit our needs to feed post-event video from locations like Southern California, Hawaii and Alaska.”
Streambox is both the name of the product family and the company that provides it. Streambox provides a single software-based platform for live and file-based video transport and acquisition over Internet Protocol using the company’s proprietary ACT-L3 codec.
“You’re taking broadcast quality video, very large files, and compressing it down to a very small amount,” said MDA Public Affairs Specialist Chris Szkrybalo. “And then you’re streaming it over an unclassified network or the Internet. Once it’s received by the Streambox you’re sending it to, it opens it back up and they’re able to record it in any format they wish.”
“Our encoder software can be loaded onto one of the Missile Defense Agency’s laptops to encode the video when they’re ready to send it,” said Mark Marchetti, director of government and military sales for Streambox. “They can send it over the Missile Defense Agency’s private network to their headquarters in Huntsville [Ala.], where it’s turned around in real time and sent via Streambox to the news agency pool feed.”
At Huntsville, Streambox has supplied its SBT3-7400 Video Transport, which is a full duplex encoder and decoder. That device can either turn around and transmit the test video in real time to the pool feed designee, or originate video such as a press conference from Huntsville itself. At the pool feed designee’s location, a Streambox SBT3-5100 decoder receives the video for distribution to the rest of the press.
MDA’s Taylor said that the agency at first used Streambox in a “shadow” mode, where it wasn’t the primary means of transmitting the video. Last December, they put it to work as the primary video transmission means.
“In December, following the test, we did a live press conference that went out over the Pentagon Channel 90 minutes after the event,” said Taylor. “We fed video of the interceptor launch from Vandenberg before we went to brief, and they had it available to play during the press conference itself.”
“Without Streambox that would have been impossible,” said Szkrybalo.
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