Missile defense multiple kill vehicle hover test

Sure the final mission configuration isn't exactly what they would test, but the differences in the sky crane maneuver on Mars and Earth would be relatively easy to factor in (ok, that might be an exaggeration, but its doable). There is a ton of control development that would need to be sorted out so they knew how to integrate it all. For example, I had heard that the primary indicator that the rover had touched down simply watching the throttle on the closed loop flight control system. When it throttled down it meant the rockets were no longer suspending the weight of the rover. If true, I would think you would want to test that quite a bit... FWIW they tested missile defense 'kill vehicles' on the ground and they will operate at or near orbital velocity in space. The main 'hover thruster' would likely be completely unnecessary in a live exercise: [this video]

This is my personal belief, which I have no way to substantiate, and solely statistical, but it helps me sleep at night or so to speak. Nobody spends more on defense than US. Also, the new technology that you hear about today is essentially declassified tech from ~20 years ago. I remember reading in the past about Boeing doing experiments with a 747 carrying a giant laser that could lock on and fry ICBMs. There was also stuff like this 14 years ago: [this video] Extrapolating to today, I firmly believe that US (and probably NATO and other countries who share intel) are watching Russian launch sites closely, ready to drop kinetic warheads from orbit at the first sign of activation, not to mention multiple layers of defense with kinetic kill vehicles, lasers, EMPS, jammers, e.t.c. That is assuming, we don't have stuxnet like malware hiding in computer systems that would just magically cause the missiles to fail. After all, Russian military was shown to be wildly incompetent (which US probably already knew), so that translates to easy infiltration/intel and creation of a safeguard plan to counter anything they have.

[link] This is what we had to build in the 60s to allow a missile to know where it physically existed precisely enough to allow it to 50% of the time hit within a circle of ~50 meters. When you get to certain points in physics, certain energy regimes, you no longer are building machines or tools or something mass market. You are building artisan scientific instruments, and then sometimes gluing explosives to them. Even modern laser ring gyros do not even share a dinner table with the precision and accuracy of the above singular component of the Peacekeeper ICBMs, and that was a long time ago. "Tech" and some of the developments of the past few decades have really confused people. The miniaturization of the transistor, and building billions of transistors on a small slice of silicon is an aberration, an anomaly. Most things don't get "Better and better and cheaper and cheaper" like that because shit just doesn't scale infinitely and in general materials science isn't that precise. For these ground based midcourse interceptors, they have to precisely loft the interceptor package at an incoming projectile. They have to shoot a bullet with a bullet, except the target bullet might even be moving around a bit, and your ability to precisely quantify the exact parameters of it's position and velocity is already limited. Is your position and velocity measurement an inch off? Two inches? Is that too much? How well have you quantified the thrust of your rocket engine? THIS specific rock