The second Aegis Ashore system reached operational readiness on Oct. 24, completing its “light off” and allowing a team of Navy, Missile Defense Agency and Lockheed Martin [LMT] officials to begin full acceptance testing before disassembling the system and shipping it to Romania next year.
The Aegis Ashore system is land-based and mirrors the deckhouse of an Aegis Ballistic Missile Defense-equipped destroyer. The modular systems are built in Lockheed Martin’s Moorestown, N.J., facility, tested, and then taken apart and shipped to their final destination–the first going to the Navy’s Pacific Missile Range Facility in Hawaii for further testing and training purposes, the second deploying to Romania by 2015 and the third deploying to Poland by 2018 as part of the Obama administration’s European Phased Adaptive Approach to missile defense.
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| U.S. Navy Fire Controlman First Class Ricky Eckhardt; Carl Bannar, vice president of Lockheed Martin’s Integrated Warfare Systems & Sensors business; Captain Jeff Weston, Missile Defense Agency Program Manager for Aegis Ashore; Jeff Bantle, vice president and general manager of Lockheed Martin’s Moorestown facility; Vice Admiral Nora Tyson, deputy commander, U.S. Navy Fleet Forces Command; Fire Controlman Second Class John Hotz; Rear Admiral Randall Hendrickson, commander, U.S. Navy Air & Missile Defense Command and Missile Defense Agency program executive for Aegis BMD. Photo courtesy Lockheed Martin. |
The light off is the second in six months, with the first Aegis Ashore facility being assembled in Hawaii in preparation for live-fire testing next year, according to a Nov. 4 Lockheed Martin statement
Throughout the rest of fiscal year 2014, the government and industry team will complete integration and testing of the Aegis Weapon System equipment in the Romania deckhouse; remove the AWS equipment, tear down the deckhouse and ship both sets of materials to Romania; install the deckhouse support building and missile launchers in Romania; and eventually receive the deckhouse and AWS for installation, according to MDA budget justification documents from April 2013.