This week Northrop Grumman revealed its bid for the next homeland missile defense interceptor recently completed its Preliminary Design Review (PDR) and expects to pass the Critical Design Review (CDR) in a little over a year.
Since 2021, the Missile Defense Agency (MDA) has been working with two teams, led by Lockheed Martin
[LMT] and Northrop Grumman [NOC], to develop independent Next Generation Interceptor (NGI) options for the Ground-based Midcourse Defense System (Defense Daily, March 21, 2021).
Northrop Grumman said it completed the PDR for its All-Up Round (AUR) on Jan. 26, Lisa Brown, Northrop Grumman’s vice president for the NGI, told reporters during a media call on January 30.
“This is actually over one year early to the contract commitment, and also ahead of our initial baselining of the overall program. So to date, the NGI Gold Team has met or beaten every one of its commitments to MDA when it comes to the timeline for major milestones,” Brown said.
She also confirmed they plan to complete the CDR in spring of 2025.
The NGO Gold Team refers to the company’s NGI competition team, including their major partner RTX’s [RTX] Raytheon segment.
Brown said while MDA committed to fielding NGI starting in 2028, “we continue to try to find ways to pull that schedule left to to start fielding as early as 2027 with our design.”
She also boasted many of their NGI subcomponents are already at the CDR level, noting that “in my 30 years with the company, I’ve never seen a PDR that showed a design and capability and logistics train that was more mature.”
Brown said during their PDR process, the team let participants assess examples of the technology and hardware used in the testing, because “one of the things we wanted to show our customer is that all of our performance models and our digital models were informed by actual hardware. It was not just software modeling standing alone.”
This included a full-scale solid rocket motor with avionics and other hardware.
Completing the PDR means the company has established the technical approach for the full integration of their interceptor design across all subsystems, allowing them to move into more advanced phases of development.
A main PDR requirement was demonstrating the design would maintain its full capability while surviving the environment from launch to intercept in space.
Brown argued their bid is particularly low risk due to production facility readiness as well as design confidence.
Northrop Grumman said their manufacturing process for NGI is production-ready because they plan to build the solid rocket motors at their Utah facility while they would build the avionics at their launch vehicles facility in Chandler, Ariz.
“They design one to two new missiles per year and have over 65 boost assembly configurations already fielded in service now,” Brown said.
Raytheon’s space factory in Tucson, Ariz. currently builds the Exoatmospheric Kill Vehicle as well as the Standard Missile-3 Block IB and Block IIA.
“So this would be adding manufacturing in facilities that are already doing extremely similar work,” she continued.
Northrop Grumman has its program office, system engineering, integration, and operations teams at their Huntsville, Ala., office where they are close to the MDA customers “so that we can keep our open, transparent culture.”
Brown said Northrop Grumman delivered its stage three NGI rocket to the Arnold Engineering Development Complex (AEDC) at Arnold AFB, Tenn., in early December and are awaiting testing.
Stages one and two of the NGI are planned to be ready within the first quarter of fiscal year 2024, while the company is “just awaiting that static test… So we’re just waiting for our place in line” for stage three.
She noted AEDC works essentially on a first come, first served way, so they meet weekly with officials there in the lead up to getting in the testing line.
Brown told Defense Daily the team’s NGI bid is less affected by defense sector-wide staffing issues than other programs because the Northrop Grumman and Raytheon portions of the program are both in steady state production on similar systems at the facilities where they plan to build NGI.
“So I think one of the things that MDA has been very pleased on this program is that we have staffed at 100 percent or very, very close, like in the 99th level, of our staffing projections since very early in the program. I’d say within the first couple of months out of the gate we were staffed fully to the line.”
While Brown admitted it is still a “challenging recruiting atmosphere,” she said Northrop Grumman has newer facilities in Huntsville and the other locations to help attrition remain low once they are fully staffed.
“We and Raytheon are very mindful to try to hold on to our people as well. So staffing has not been an issue,” she said. “And frankly, we have a very robust retention plan and I don’t see that we’re going to have an issue. This team is very, very eager to continue through CDR and into production. And I don’t anticipate a problem with staffing.”
“And yes, I realized that that is a unique position to be given the landscape across large defense programs. So I feel very fortunate,” Brown added.
Separately, Brown highlighted the program at Northrop Grumman and Raytheon “has a lot of visibility” across the two companies’ senior leadership, which helps smooth over any problems that emerge when they need resources.
“So we have been afforded a lot of access and best of best subject matter expertise, talent. There’s also a very open culture across the team that if any aspect of the program, whether it’s technical or business management or global supply chain gets in the ditch, we get it out of the ditch immediately. We don’t allow problems to linger.”
Brown also said while every program has some sort of funding pressure, they “stay fully transparent with MDA when it comes to our current spending plans and spending profiles” and keep that transparency with the government so they can move elements around as necessary to stay on target.
This means that in conversations with MDA, “if there are perturbances to the budget, we work closely on things that we together can push and pull down at the minutia level,” to be able to satisfy the program mission and major milestones.
She also said thus far “we haven’t found haven’t had any issues that would cause a perturbance to major milestones – to date. I can’t predict the future.”
Last August, MDA’s then-acting director said the agency plans to start testing the down-selected NGI winner in 2027 and anticipates operational testing on NGI “in the ‘29 timeframe” (Defense Daily, Aug. 10, 2023).
Current MDA Director Lt. Gen. Heath Collins at the time said the agency was focused on starting to emplace NGIs into the silos in fiscal year 2028.
Since testing will occur starting in 2029, this means NGIs are not expected to be deployed in larger numbers until the mid-2030s.
The Department of Defense currently fields 44 older Ground Based Interceptors (GBIs) based largely at Fort Greely, Alaska. The department previously completed construction on 20 more silos originally planned for the Redesigned Kill Vehicle program, which was canceled and replaced with NGI.
MDA plans to install the NGIs into those silos initially while potentially later replacing the older GBIs.