HUNTSVILLE, Ala. – The two Next Generation Interceptor (NGI) industry teams this week said they expect to reach the Preliminary Design Review (PDR) for the All Up Round before the year is out, as both are also marking progress with specific subsystems.
Northrop Grumman
[NOC] this week revealed it successfully built the first set of solid rocket motor cases for all three stages of its version of the NGI.
The company said these pathfinder motors demonstrate designs, manufacturing processes and allow their teams to test and conduct integration operations.
Northrop Grumman called this a “significant achievement” demonstrating the company’s “robust designs and manufacturing capabilities” as the NGI competition continues.
In 2021, the Missile Defense Agency first selected Northrop Grumman and Lockheed Martin [LMT] to conduct initial technology development and risk reduction work on the NGI (Defense Daily, March 21, 2021)
MDA is pushing for the NGI to upgrade and replace the current older 44 Ground Based Interceptors (GBIs) used by the Ground-based Midcourse Defense system to defend against a small number of North Korean nuclear weapons on intercontinental ballistic missiles.
The NGI is meant to better counter a limited number of missile threats that include more advanced capabilities like multiple warhead kill vehicles or decoys. The GBIs are primarily at Fort Greely, Alaska with a few at Vandenberg Space Force Base Calif.
The Defense Department is planning to start with procuring 20 NGIs for the Fort Greely, Alaska site that already has the 20 silos ready for them.
“We have finished the case manufacturing for all three stages of NGI. What’s going to happen soon is that we’re going to be filling these cases with an inert propellant, we’ll be shipping them here to Redstone Arsenal, where we will start doing integration work,” Lisa Brown, vice president for NGI at Northrop Grumman, told reporters here on Aug. 7 ahead of the Space and Missile defense Symposium.
Brown was speaking at the company’s new facilities in Huntsville partially built for NGI.
At Redstone Arsenal, the NGI stages will be integrated with the company’s interceptor and continue proving out processes.
She emphasized the company is trying to “learn as early as humanly possible,” so they built this actual hardware to move past limited steps like non-hardware-related configuration exercises of manufacturing floor exercises.
Brown added this means the company plans to start static firing of their solid rockets by the end of 2023 and complete the Preliminary Design Review two months ahead of schedule, to be done by the end of this calendar year.
She said this came after Northrop Grumman was able to pull their NGI System Requirements Review (SRR) ahead by three months ahead of their original commitment, leading to moving up the PDR.
Brown also said the company is trying to push up the schedule for the Critical Design Review (CDR), which typically occurs about a year after PDR, so it could occur before the end of 2024.
“So I think we’re doing well. I think we have not only met every major program milestone on time, we’ve actually accelerated a bit,” Brown said.
Brown said she is overall hopeful on their NGI schedule going forward.
“I think originally we planned on doing CDR in early ‘25 and we’re trying to pull it back into ‘24 as well.”
This all means the company expects to be ready to move to flight tests around 2026, although the current contract does not include flight test integration and specific timelines.
Brown said while they have primarily worked from a digital design, they have a lot of hardware on site, too, and “there’s nothing that promotes credibility as much as actually having a petting zoo with your equipment that’s already been through PDR and some that’s already been through CDR.”
Likewise, Lockheed Martin on Tuesday announced its version of NGI has “successfully validated designs” for all the elements of its interceptor as it completed on-schedule PDRs for the major subsystems of its version of NGI. This has led to the company setting up the All Up Round PDR to be ready faster, within two months.
Todd Stevens, director of Advanced Programs for NGI, told Defense Daily the company is on track to complete its All Up Round Preliminary Design Review by the fourth quarter of fiscal year 2023, which ends in September.
Their schedule means after the PDR is finished on time, they ultimately forecast being able to deliver the first NGI unit as early as fiscal year 2027.
“During these reviews, we took a modern and transparent approach through the use of advanced digital engineering and model-based engineering tools. Our NGI team will continue on-plan to demonstrate our revolutionary NGI architecture, leveraging mature technologies for high mission confidence,” Sarah Reeves, vice president of NGI at Lockheed Martin, said in a statement.
While Lockheed Martin did not reveal any specific physical production like Northrop Grumman, Stevens said each of the subsystem PDRs entailed analysis and hardware demonstrations for MDA to validate the design.
“The customer (MDA) has asked us, and we have put forward early and often hardware demonstrations,” he said.
Stevens characterized Lockheed Martin’s NGI demonstrations as focused on propulsion, processing, communications and sensing.
“So, in each of those functions, we’ve provided demonstrations in the lab that allow us to anchor our models and our simulation that give us confidence in the results for demonstrating a PDR, from a performance perspective. And I think you can expect from us to see more hardware as we progress through the program.”
Stevens also argued the all-digital design is helping them move the program along faster and they have already demonstrated the initial software factory for MDA.
“A digital design has allowed us to go faster. It’s allowed us to integrate our manufacturing and production operations team early in the design phase, as we look to continue to accelerate the schedule for the customer. We’ve been able to pull that piece of the program left, which will set us up for the product development phase and flight test and production in the future,” Stevens said.
Lockheed Martin said the upshot of using its integrated digital tool chain is focused on affordability across the program lifecycle with faster decision-making and enabling rapid delivery as well.
In April, former Missile Defense Agency Director Vice Adm. Jon Hill told a congressional panel the current NGI acquisition allows DoD options to expand past 20 NGIs and that both companies are on course to deliver an initial capability by 2027 rather than the government plans for 2028 (Defense Daily, April 21).
Hill underscored maintaining both competitors through the Critical Design Review means they will develop two production lines and, if the government decides to, put them in a place of flexibility to produce the 20 NGIs faster to either add to or replace the 44 GBIs or go past 20 NGIs.
“So it’s a very flexible acquisition strategy. And I think those decisions do not have to be made today,” Hill said.