The Department of Homeland Security’s Science and Technology Directorate is gearing up to test unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) to see if they can keep commercial flights safe from heat-seeking, shoulder-fired missiles at a reasonable cost.

The technological venture is named Project Chloe in honor of a protagonist on “24,” one of DHS Secretary Michael Chertoff’s favorite television programs.

The impetus for the project is a desire to find an economically viable method for safeguarding airline flights from Man-Portable Air-Defense Systems (MANPADS), which are lightweight shoulder-fired heat-seeking missiles.

A technology designed to accomplish this task has already entered a third phase of testing, but a $1 million per plane ballpark estimate has so far proven too rich for Congress and airlines.

The tested device, known as the Guardian System and produced by Northrop Grumman Corp., is an external pod attached to the belly of an aircraft that scans in all directions for incoming missiles. If an incoming projectile is detected, the system’s turret fires an infrared laser at the missile to disrupt its guidance systems and send the weapon off target.

Most missiles are built to disarm themselves if they fly through the air for an extended period of time, minimizing the possibility there could be unintended consequences to an errant shot.

The idea behind using UAVs as anti-MANPADS devices involves equipping the drones with similar infrared countermeasures and having them probe the entire airfield from 60,000 to 65,000 feet above the ground.

Instead of having to equip each aircraft with a pod, one or a handful of UAVs may be able to accomplish the same task at airports of all sizes.

Testing of UAVs for this purpose is scheduled to begin in the late summer and wrap up sometime in the early fall, according to S&T Project Manager Kerry Wilson.

The initial round of testing will not focus on infrared countermeasures, but rather the capabilities and limits of the UAV platforms and the sensors that detect the missiles.

“The platform that we actually want to use, we haven’t ironed out those details just yet — it could be a Global Hawk, it could be a Predator . . . [or] we may have to go to a manned surrogate part just to test the sensors,” Wilson said. “We are planning . . . to take an existing missile warning system that works at low altitudes and make some modifications to it and see how it holds up at some of those high altitudes.”

San Diego-based General Atomics is the prime contractor on the Predator B drones that will be tested, with each unit costing approximately $9 million and having a maximum altitude of 50,000 feet, according to company specifications.

Northrop Grumman’s Ryan Aeronautical Center, also based in San Diego, is the prime contractor for Global Hawks, which cost between $20.3 million and $27.6 million without sensor packages, according to company specifications. Global Hawks can reach altitudes of 60,000 feet.

S&T officials were not available to provide details about how the drones would be modified to operate at altitudes between 60,000 and 65,000 feet.

The testing will also investigate whether one or multiple UAVs are adequate to patrol an entire airfield, including large facilities such as New York’s John F. Kennedy International Airport.

Furthermore, S&T will explore whether one UAV might cover more than one airport when the airports are clustered relatively close together, as exemplified by the proximity of the Washington area’s Baltimore-Washington International Thurgood Marshall Airport, Dulles International Airport and Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport.

In a related effort, S&T also sent out a Bureau Agency Announcement in late March asking the private sector to make technological suggestions for the UAV anti-missile project by April 25. The announcement also asked for suggestions for other payload platforms that could be used for DHS missions.

“We will evaluate those white papers and then go back and ask a certain number of them to provide full proposals,” Wilson said. “Then we will evaluate those proposals again and then based on the best value for the government, we will give an award to the particular companies that we select.”

A couple of congressmen with long-held interests in the anti-MANPADS issue expressed differing reactions to the UAV testing.

“The technologies that were chosen for mounting on the aircraft were laser operations, so I don’t see any reason why you couldn’t mount something similar on a UAV,” said Rep. John L. Mica, R-Fla. “This is definitely a Star Wars concept, but I am glad to see that they are thinking outside of the box. It is not a development program as I am told. We will actually be able to see something that works.”

However, Rep. Steve Israel, D-N.Y., thinks enough research has been done to start implementing some anti-MANPADS systems.

“The quest for the perfect technology to protect against shoulder-fired missiles has been a series of moving targets,” Israel said. “As soon as we get close to settling on one countermeasure, plans to test or develop another technology are announced. While many cite the cost of countermeasures as a prohibitive factor, a single attack on a commercial plane would cost the aviation industry $70 billion.”

Israel and Rep. Melissa Bean, D-Ill., are drafting a bill that would install Guardian System technology on aircraft serving the Civil Reserve Air Fleet, which transports U.S. troops to the Middle East.

At least one non-government agency interested in tackling the shoulder-fired missile threat also questioned how much research is enough.

“They are going to drop another $12.7 million on technical countermeasure, now we are up to almost $300 million exploring technical countermeasures and we don’t have a single airliner equipped with a defensive system yet,” said Matthew Schroeder, the arms sales monitoring project manager at the Federation of American Scientists. “What are the opportunity costs of developing these systems, and is it high enough that we may want to reconsider doing technical project after technical project?”

Furthermore, the directed infrared countermeasures, which are the primary focus of the DHS counter-MANPADS efforts, may not be able to thwart non-heat-seeking missiles that are guided by an optical sight operated by a ground crew, such as RBS 70s, Schroeder said. Future generations of MANPADS that have technology that can defeat infrared countermeasures could also be problematic down the road.

For example, Toshiba Corp. in 1994 began supplying the Japanese Self-Defense Force with Type 91 Kin-SAM portable surface-to-air missile systems, which can memorize the appearance of their target, making them extremely resistant to defensive countermeasures, according to Jane’s Land-Based Air Defense 2006-2007.

Stil,l the most accessible, economic, easily operated and threatening weapons are heat-seeking MANPADS, and modified UAVs could prove to be an effective system.

Project Chloe falls under the S&T’s innovative prototypical solutions where the research is considered high risk and high reward. Simply stated, there is far from a guarantee that Project Chloe will succeed, but if it does, the resulting technology could prove to be a defensive home run.

This category of projects is designed to deliver prototype demonstrations of “game-changing” technologies within two to five years. It also is designed to deliver proof-of-concept technologies that could result in high payoffs within one to three years. This grouping would receive $60 million next year under the president’s proposed budget.

Matthew M. Johnson can be reached at mjohnson@cq.com.