The Pentagon's Missile Defence Agency (MDA) has announced it is building an intranet to help speed up its Star Wars development programme.

MDA is building a portal to give government and military researchers access to vast amounts of classified data on missile shield testing.

Currently if scientists want to access the data they need to travel to one of three libraries in Alabama, Colorado and Tennessee.

Steve Waugh, deputy chief information officer at MDA, said work on the portal was started in December and stage one, which is now online, made data from each library accessible through a web browser.

He said that before the portal was established it took weeks to get access to information. Now researchers can get it in the same day.

The intranet is not connected to the public internet and is run over a private network run by the Department of Defense.

It has high-grade encryption, user authorisation and security procedures to protect it.