The U.S. Air Force launched a $1.3 billion satellite made by Bethesda-based Lockheed Martin Corp. and designed to improve early warning of enemy ballistic missiles, officials said. After years of delays and cost overruns, the satellite, part of the Space-Based Infrared System, lifted off on an Atlas V rocket at 2:10 p.m. Friday from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida, said Jessica Rye of the United Launch Alliance, the Lockheed-Boeing Co. joint venture that manufactures the Atlas.
The satellite is the first of four in the system, designed to orbit 22,300 miles in space, carrying improved sensors to detect infrared heat from missiles.
The mission comes almost nine years after the original September 2002 launch date. The program, which started in 1995, has more than quadrupled in cost to $17.6 billion from an earlier estimate of $4.1 billion, according to Pentagon figures.
“This is quite a moment for the Air Force,” Christina Chaplain, director of acquisition and sourcing management at the Government Accountability Office, said in an e-mail. “SBIRS is greatly needed to sustain our missile warning capability. Yet the program has been an incredible struggle.”
Chaplain said the program’s difficulties were emblematic of space acquisition problems in the last decade: immature technologies at the start, underestimation of costs, overly ambitious goals, poorly managed requirements, lax oversight.
The program is budgeted to cost $4.4 billion over five years, from fiscal 2012 through fiscal 2016, according to Air Force budget documents.
Lockheed Martin is the main contractor on the system; Northrop Grumman Corp., which is moving its headquarters from Los Angeles to Fairfax, is the payload integrator.
The program is “one of Lockheed Martin Space Systems’ largest and most visible programs,” Michael Friedman, a spokesman for Lockheed Martin, said in a telephone interview. The launch “culminates years of hard work.”
Each satellite contains a scanning sensor for wide area surveillance and a staring sensor to provide better views of smaller areas of interest, he said. The sensors are to be activated in about a month, and deliver useful information to the intelligence community in about six months, he said.
Air Force Lieutenant Colonel Ryan Umstattd of the Infrared Space Systems Directorate at the Los Angeles Air Force Base in California said the satellite cost $1.3 billion and has superior sensor technology.
“We’ll be able to see things sooner and for a longer duration,” he said. “With something like missile defense, timing is everything.”
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