“It wasn’t a good day, not at all,” said Riki Ellison, founder of the Missile Defense Advocacy Alliance, a non-profit group that urges missile defense development. “If you’re the American public, you’ve paid a lot for this system, you want to make sure that you are going to be protected. This doesn’t give the confidence that you need.”

The whole program reportedly has a budget of about $10 billion a year. Each test, according to Ellison, costs about $100 million, including the $60 million to $70 million for each of the ground-based interceptors, or GBI missiles…

And Lehner pointed out that three tests prior to this year’s two failures were successful.

“If it seems to some like the (Department of Defense) has been testing these interceptors for a long time, it has,” said John Pike, president of GlobalSecurity.org. Wednesday’s failed test was a “great-grandchild of the Homing Overlay Experiment that was initiated in the Carter administration and had four tests under Reagan, one of which worked.”