Artist’s notional depiction of NGI in flight. (Credit: Lockheed Martin.)
SMD SYMPOSIUM — Lockheed Martin and Northrop Grumman, competitors in the Missile Defense Agency’s billion-dollar effort to develop its Next-Generation Interceptor (NGI), both say they are striving to shave months off their planned schedules for delivering a prototype.
“We have recently gone through all of our preliminary design reviews over the last recent weeks, and we’ve completed all of those on our accelerated schedule. What this really means is we’ve validated all the design elements of our Next-Generation Interceptors through these reviews with the Missile Defense Agency,” Sarah Reeves, vice president and program manager of Lockheed’s NGI program, told Breaking Defense. “We have been consistently on track to an accelerated schedule of [fiscal] 2027” for delivery of its first prototype.
Lisa Brown, vice president for NGI at Northrop, told reporters here Monday that the company’s team has “not only met every major program milestone on time,” but “actually accelerated” their schedule. The Northrop team finished systems requirements review three months ahead of scheduled, and is “in the process of also pulling PDR [preliminary design review] at least two months left.” This lays out a pathway, she added, to moving critical design review from early in calendar year 2025 to the end of 2024.
MDA awarded development contracts to the two teams — Northrop Grumman, partnered with Raytheon, now RTX, and Lockheed Martin, partnered with Aerojet Rocketdyne — in 2021. The goal is to field the new interceptor by 2028.
The agency currently plans to buy 20 NGIs starting in 2028 to augment the current Ground-Based Interceptors (GBIs) making up MDA’s Ground-Based Midcourse Defense (GMD) program designed to defend the US homeland from “rogue” North Korean or Iranian ICBM attacks. NGI is one of MDA’s biggest planned investments in fiscal 2024, slating $2.1 billion for its Ground-based Midcourse Defense (GMD) program, which the agency’s budget overview says “features a multiple kill vehicle payload.”
The funds will cover “design, development, prototyping, integration and relevant environmental testing to mature the booster, payload, sensor(s), and design-specific critical technologies and technology elements to reduce technical risk,” the document adds.
Northrop announced today that in keeping with its efforts to compact its development schedule, the company has now manufactured the first set of solid rocket motor cases for the program. “The completed cases will be filled with inert propellant and shipped to Redstone Arsenal, Ala., where they will be integrated into an interceptor, continuing pathfinder activities and further proving out processes. Once integration is complete, the interceptor will be used for additional testing and process verification,” a press release explained.
Meanwhile, Lockheed on Monday announced that following successful subsystem reviews, the company is gearing up for what it calls an “All Up Round” preliminary design review. Reeves told Breaking Defense that review is “coming up here in the quarter,” adding that MDA “will assess if our solutions ready to move on to the critical design review phase.”
