By Geoff Fein
After months of layoff, Raytheon [RTN] will restart testing of its Extended Range Guided Munition (ERGM) early next year to demonstrate to the Navy the reliability of the round, a company official said.
Additionally, in October, Raytheon signed a contract with the Navy for the ERGM completion program which will run through the period of at sea tests in 2010, Gary Hagedon, program director ERGM, told Defense Daily in a recent interview.
The total ERGM development is the same the company committed to in 2006–$89 million, he said.
Since firing its last tactically configured round in 2005, the company has been pulling back together its supplier base to gear up for the January 2008 shots, Dan Lambert, ERGM business development manager, told Defense Daily in the same interview.
“Those [January 2008] flight tests are pretty important because it’s our first flight test since 2005, and these are engineering validation tests,” he said.
Some minor changes were made to ERGM, due to parts obsolescence. Lambert pointed out that ERGM has a new GPS and IMU (inertial measurement unit).
“We had three to four known reliability problems we had to go fix. That involves some design changes. Then we had to integrate all those things and make them work right together, so there are some software changes that have to be made,” he added.
One change the ERGM team made was to incorporate the company’s Excalibur’s GPS card. Excalibur is a 155 precision-guided artillery round.
“Excalibur is one version beyond where ERGM was, and they had solved some of the issues we had remaining on the card,” Hagedon said. “So we made a decision to bring Excalibur GPS in directly.”
ERGM and Excalibur, however, share more than a GPS card. The test equipment is pretty much the same, the processes Raytheon uses for building the rounds are pretty much the same and ERGM is in the same facility Excalibur was during its development phase. The two rounds weigh roughly 105 pounds each and ERGM is in alignment with Excalibur on anti- jamming, Hagedon noted.
“ERGM and Excalibur share just about everything,” he said. “Common suppliers, common design. There are very minor differences between the two rounds. ERGM started first. Excalibur took it to next generation…they progressed a little further. Now we are bringing ERGM up to the same configuration. The two rounds should cost about the same in large quantity production.”
Aside from adding the new GPS/IMU cards, there are 30 firsts, Lambert explained.
“There are 30 things we can identify in the rounds that we are building up today that are flying for the first time,” he said. “When we say flying for the first time that’s first time being shot out of a gun in the ERGM tactical configuration.”
Most of those were obsolescence related reliability improvements, Hagedon added.
“This is our chance to make sure everything works right before we go to the reliability tests in September,” Lambert said. “We already started purchasing hardware for the September tests.”
The ERGM team has enough material for six shots in January, Lambert said. “We are going to shoot somewhere between three and six.”
The goal of the January tests at White Sands Missile Range in New Mexico will be to find out any issues that crop up in those shots that will have to be dealt with before the Reliability Growth Test Rounds (RGTR) in September, Hagedon said.
The September shots will also occur at White Sands.
He noted the company would have the opportunity to do additional tests between January and September to fix and issues that arise.
Between the September RGTR shots and the at-sea testing, there will be some land-based flight tests to verify performance of ERGM’s key performance parameters. Hagedon said those tests would probably occur in the second quarter of calendar year ’09.
Since its last contract in November 2006, ERGM has been on incremental contracts because the acquisition strategy had yet to be signed, Hagedon said.
“We got under our first contract last November. That [contract] lasted five months…the period of performance was five months. Then we got an extension for three months, then for two months, then three weeks,” he said. “Then the acquisition strategy got signed in early January, and then (the Navy) signed a completion contract…Oct. 16.
That contract pretty much locks in the supplier base, Hagedon added.
Alliant Techsystems [ATK] is also building a round for the Navy’s Extended Range Munition effort. In September, the company successfully tested its Ballistic Trajectory Extended Range Munition motors. However, ATK has been unable to test a full-up BTERM for more than a year. The company recently rescheduled two planned November BTERM tests for December, a company spokeswoman said.