Industry teams near milestone to build novel US missile interceptor

Using advanced digital design methods, the two teams competing to develop the Missile Defense Agency’s Next-Generation Interceptor are nearing a key milestone by the end of the year: a preliminary design review for the all-up round.

The agency chose two teams – Northrop Grumman working with Raytheon Technologies, an RTX company, and Lockheed Martin with Aerojet Rocketdyne – to design a replacement for the Ground-based Midcourse Defense system’s Ground-Based Interceptors, www.defensenews.com reports. The contracts for both teams are worth $1.6 billion in total.

“We have finished the [solid rocket motor] case manufacturing for all three stages of NGI,” Lisa Brown, who runs Northrop Grumman’s bid, told a group of reporters Aug. 7 at the company’s brand-new facilities here, built partly for the NGI effort. “We’re going to be filling these cases with inert propellant. We’ll be shipping them here to Redstone Arsenal, where we will start doing integration work” into an interceptor, she said.

And the company is planning to start static firings of its solid rocket motors for the NGI program by the end of 2023, Brown added.

Lockheed Martin announced also on Aug. 7 in a statement that it had “successfully validated designs for all elements” of its NGI design with the Missile Defense Agency.

“Through a series of successful and on-schedule Preliminary Design Reviews (PDRs) of all NGI major subsystems, the company demonstrated it has achieved design maturity and reduced risk for critical technologies,” the statement reads.

Over a year ago, both teams competing set out to plant deeper roots in Huntsville as part of an effort to try to speed up NGI’s fielding as intercontinental ballistic missile threats from North Korea and Iran grow.

Lockheed Martin broke ground on a new $16.5 million, 25,000-square-foot Missile System Integration Lab in Huntsville in 2022 exclusively for the development of NGI, and Northrop began building two large facilities around the same time. Northrop’s two buildings are now open for business.

There are 44 GBIs in the ground with the majority in silos at Fort Greely, Alaska, and the rest at Vandenberg Space Force Base, California. The current interceptors aren’t equipped to counter a missile that could contain multiple kill vehicles or decoys that make the defeat process more complicated, defense officials have said.

Vice Adm. Jon Hill, who was the MDA’s director until last month, said the goal was to get NGI loaded into underground silos beginning around 2028. But both teams have said they can get there one year earlier.