The Missile Defense Agency (MDA) awarded Lockheed Martin [LMT] a $585 million delivery order for the Homeland Defense Radar – Hawaii (HDR-H) on Dec. 18.
HDR-H is a discrimination radar that aims to better help the Ground-Based Midcourse Defense System defend Hawaii from ballistic missile threats from North Korea.
The announcement said the company will design, develop, and deliver the HDR-H, which will provide “autonomous acquisition and persistent precision tracking and discrimination to optimize the defensive capability of the Ballistic Missile Defense System (BMDS) and counter evolving threats.”
The company will leverage its development of the Long Range Discrimination Radar (LRDR) “to provide the lowest risk and best value HDR-H solution to MDA, which includes open, scalable architecture for future growth,” Chandra Marshall, program director for Lockheed Martin’s Missile Defense Radar market segment, said in a statement.
Earlier this month Marshall told reporters at the company’s Moorestown, N.J., facility that the HDR-H builds on its work with the LRDR. The Hawaii radar “leverages everything that we’ve done and implemented to date for LRDR and improved upon it based on the different threats that we have to attack for HRDR-H.”
MDA said this award was the result of a competitively awarded acquisition, but only Lockheed Martin sent an offer. In all, $51 million in FY 2018 and 2019 research, development, test and evaluation (RDT&E) funds were obligated at award time. The contract performance will run through December 2023.
The work will be done at Lockheed Martin’s radar facility in Moorestown and Oahu, Hawaii, where the radar will be located. The Defense Department said the precise HDR-H location in Oahu will be determined after it finishes the site selection and National Environmental Policy Act processes.
Marshall underscored earlier this month that HDR-H Hawaii is the first of potentially three additional missile defense radars under MDA.
“So we’re really focused on taking the technology that we’ve matured and developed and building upon that to address the threats as they kind of evolve in this solicitation,” she said.
The LRDR is a gallium-nitride-based S-Band radar being developed for deployment in Clear, Alaska, to help MDA further distinguish between ballistic missiles and decoys or other objects at long ranges. It will be 30 feet tall and about the size of four semi-truck trailers.
In October, Lockheed Martin finished a technical milestone for the LRDR, finishing a closed loop satellite track to demonstrate “significant maturity” using its Solid State Radar Integration Site small scale version of LRDR in Moorestown. The company started construction of the Alaska LRDR in September. (Defense Daily, Oct. 16).
Marshall said LRDR is still scheduled for an on-time delivery in 2020.
Also, in July, Japan selected the LRDR as the radar for its two future Aegis Ashore facilities, choosing it over Raytheon’s [RTN] SPY-6 Air and Missile Defense Radar (AMDR) (Defense Daily, July 30).