Moreover, I am not concerned about holding SDI to higher reliability standards than systems such as Aegis or others. I am concerned about just meeting those standards. There exist no current software technologies which will guarantee that the software meets these requirements or can be used to accurately measure software reliability in this range. I wish to assure him that I had read them twice. The capability to shoot down meteors could be considered, by normal engineering standards, an overdesign as well.
Some systems are easy to test, others are hard to test.
Systems like Aegis are difficult to test, but SDI would be more difficult. Further, the SDI requirements are stricter. During the development of the De Havilland Victor jet bomber, roughly a contemporary of the B-52, the designers were concerned about possible problems with the unusual tailplane design. Resonance tests were run on the first prototype before it flew, with the results cranked into aerodynamic equations. Early flight tests included some tests whose results could be extrapolated to reveal flutter behavior.