There’s a naval weapons station right to the southwest of that track, about 50 miles away maybe. A navy SM-2 missile has an unclassified range of 90 nautical miles. It’s likely that they would have been testing some variant of this missile for vertical launch, perhaps with some new phased array radar experiments and such. Up to the 90s, the navy was still using rail launched missiles and traditional radar emitters and the article talks about ships several years out that can’t be used for these tests, which I assume are thee first of current AEGIS ships.
