Lockheed Martin [LMT] finished another technical milestone for its Long Range Discrimination Radar (LRDR), completing a closed loop satellite track with tactical hardware and software, setting the company up to start full-rate production before the end of the year, officials announced this week

The company said this marked a “significant achievement” on the way to delivery of the LRDR to the Missile Defense Agency (MDA) in 2020.

The Solid State Radar Integration Site (SSRIS) at Lockheed Martin’s Moorestown, NJ, facility. (Photo: Lockheed Martin)
The Solid State Radar Integration Site (SSRIS) at Lockheed Martin’s Moorestown, NJ, facility. (Photo: Lockheed Martin)

This milestone entailed Lockheed Martin using production hardware, tactical backend processing equipment, and tactical software to demonstrate system performance in an operational environment. Within the environment, it conducted a set of tests like closed loop satellite track, which demonstrates” significant maturity,” Lockheed Martin said.

Chandra Marshall, Lockheed Martin’s LRDR program director, told reporters Tuesday the radar system met all technical requirements for tracking threats in its field of view.

“We were able to use the radar system that we built to successfully search, acquire and track numerous satellites across the field of view for the radar facility that we have here in Moorestown,” Marshall said. 

The testing used the company’s Solid State Radar Integration site (SSRIS) in Moorestown, N.J. SSRIS is a small scale version of the eventual LRDR and is being used for further solid state radar work.

The LRDR is an S-Band radar that uses gallium nitride (GaN) components. It is being developed to help distinguish between ballistic missile threats and other objects or decoys at longer range distances. It will be 30 feet tall and the size of four semi-truck trailers.

Lockheed Martin and the MDA finished the LRDR’s critical design review last November, which validated the system was ready for the fabrication, demonstration, and test phase (Defense Daily, Nov. 16, 2017).

Marshall noted production remains on schedule with construction of the radar beginning last month in Alaska. The company is deploying another team next spring to finalize the LRDR installations. 

“Since the contract was awarded in 2015, the LRDR team has been moving fast and keeping a steady pace achieving every milestone successfully on the path to delivery in 2020,” Marshall said in a statement.

MDA first awarded the company a nine-year $784 million contract to develop and build the LRDR in 2015 (Defense Daily, Oct. 21, 2015).

Marshall told reporters LRDR is already capable of tracking and acquiring three additional threats above what was included in the original contract the award, and plans to build on the radar’s modularity to account for new challenges, including hypersonics.

“We’re looking at extending the LRDR to support the hypersonic missile threat and various other threats like that. We are in discussions with the customer right now on supporting future increments for LRDR, so basically to add to the capability after we field in 2020,” Marshall said. 

In July, Japan selected the LRDR for use in its two future Aegis Ashore facilities, rather than use Raytheon’s SPY-6 Air and Missile Defense Radar (AMDR), which will be fitted on to new Arleigh Burke-class Flight III destroyers (Defense Daily, July 30).

Japan’s decision noted the LRDR ranked higher in backward support including reliability, maintainability of components, and the supply support system. It also was ranked as cheaper to produce compared to the AMDR. Each Japanese Aegis Ashore LRDR is expected to cost about $1.2 billion.

The Japanese Aegis Ashore sites are expected to be operational by 2023.