Lockheed Martin advances Next-Gen Interceptor design work

WASHINGTON — Lockheed Martin today announced that its effort to prototype a Next Generation Interceptor (NGI) for the Missile Defense Agency has passed its preliminary design review (PDR), moving the company another step forward in its competition with Northrop Grumman for the billion-dollar program.

The successful review means that the company’s digital NGI design now heads forward to critical design review in the third quarter of fiscal 2025, according to the announcement, during which “MDA will assess when flight testing can begin. The first Lockheed Martin NGI is forecast for delivery to the warfighter as early as FY2027.”

Both primes in August told reporters that they are making every effort to accelerate their design and delivery schedules in hopes of getting prototypes in the air for flight testing more quickly.

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 program’s original goal was to begin fielding the new interceptor by 2028.

MDA’s Acting Director Rear Adm. Doug Williams told the annual Space and Missile Defense symposium in Huntsville, Ala., on Aug. 9 that the agency is hoping to begin NGI testing in 2027 “with the anticipation of operational testing of NGI at the end of 2029.”

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 the GMD program, which the agency’s budget overview says “features a multiple kill vehicle payload.”