By Geoff Fein
A new supersonic target under development by ATK [ATK] will provide the Navy a new platform to prepare sailors to respond to more advance anti-ship cruise missiles, according to a company official.
After a roughly four-month delay due to a contract protest, ATK is moving ahead on MSST, with a first test flight planned for September 2010, Dave Wise, general manger advanced weapons division, told Defense Daily last week.
Wise said his division at ATK is focused on affordable precision and affordable innovation.
“We think that we’ve got a pretty focused and efficient systems engineering approach to these kinds of problems,” he said.
“When we really got looking at the kind of skill sets that we have available, particularly in our Woodland Hills (Calif.) location where we have been running the ARGAAM (advanced anti-radiation guided missile) program, the kinds of program management, systems engineering, supply chain management skill sets that we have available, and looked at adjacent areas to apply that capability, the notion of targets fit very well,” Wise said. “Particularly when you take into account the fact that we also, in other parts of our corporation, have very good propulsion capability and airframe capability.”
When ATK first looked at the target capability the company really thought they had something good to offer the Navy, Wise said.
“We dug into it a little bit and put together our concepts and ideas, and came up with an approach based on a systems engineering approach, an approach that we think is going to provide a very accurate representation of the threat to meet the customer’s requirement in a pretty affordable package and low-risk package,” he said.
“Once we saw we had a good solution for the Navy, we started working on it, and iterated it and spent a fair amount of our own time over the pre-proposal getting ready for this and putting together the proposal for the customer,” he added.
Wise estimates ATK probably worked on its MSST proposal for about two years before the request for proposal (RFP) came out.
The requirements for the target are based on real threat systems, Wise added. “So you can assume there are real threat systems that have comparable characteristics.”
“When we studied the requirements from the [Navy] and how this thing had to fly and what it needed to do, how we could adapt existing capabilities and systems to provide something that looks very much like the real threat, our system is based on a number of things that have been done,” he said. “This provided that low-risk approach.”
MSST’s subsonic bus is a derivative of a target that ATK’s teammate Composite Engineering (CEI) has been building for the Air Force, Wise noted.
“The rocket motor for our sprint vehicle is based on a system we have had in production for a long time–the vertical launch ASROC (Anti-Submarine Rocket) motor,” he said.
Even MSST’s front end system was based on experiences ATK and CEI have had on other programs, Wise said.
“So we really tried to bring to bear existing capability for a low-risk approach throughout the systems engineering process,” he said.
Although ATK was awarded the contract in September ’08, a protest filed by Orbital Sciences [ORB], eventually denied by the Government Accountability Office, delayed work on the program until December.
“We are in high gear right now. We are looking at our preliminary design review in October ’09. We will actually fly an early test system in early September ’10 as we lead up to CDR (critical design review) in Feb. ’11,” Wise said.
“This is about a 49-month program. We’ll be completing design development testing [of] a number of systems…that will wrap up at about the end of ’12, before moving into production phase in ’13.”
Last September the Navy awarded ATK a $97 million contract for the design, development, integration, and test of the Multi-Stage Supersonic Target or MSST (Defense Daily, Sept. 3).
The target initially flies in at a subsonic speed. A ship’s weapon systems look at it and recognize it as a subsonic threat, Capt. Pat Buckley, program manager, PMA-208, Aerial Targets and Decoy Systems, told Defense Daily in a recent interview.
“The ship’s weapon system could very well say we are not going to shoot it 15…20 miles out. The probability of kill isn’t the greatest until it gets in closer. So the weapon system actually calculates where is the highest probability kill zone so we don’t have to waste extra ordnance to try and take it out,” Buckley said.
Typically the weapon system could wait. The problem is, however, when this family of threat gets about 10 to 12 miles away, there is a separation sequence where the subsonic bus falls away and a supersonic vehicle accelerates, Buckley said.
MSST will accelerate to over Mach 3, he added.
“There is a range of speeds we gave to the contractor, so it’s in the Mach 3 range. Now your weapon system just thought this thing was a lumbering subsonic cruise missile. It goes from that to an accelerating supersonic sprint vehicle and the transition happens 10 to 12 miles away…you’ve got 20 seconds [to respond],” Buckley said.
“It’s very much a threat we don’t currently have the ability to test against. We have done [modeling and simulation]. We believe our weapon systems can handle this threat,” he added (Defense Daily, Feb. 24).
MSST doesn’t look like any kind of anti-ship cruise ship missile seen before, Buckley noted. “You can tell this isn’t meant to be an exact replication of what the threat is, but it sure will look like the threat to our combat systems.
“Your weapon system has got to accommodate a change from subsonic to supersonic accelerating on top of that. Most of the threats we deal with are constant speed, so to have something that is accelerating, and depending on the range it is separating at, the rocket motor can run out of fuel and then be slowing down towards the terminal…in the Mach 2 range,” he added.
The initial plan was to build 50 MSST targets, Buckley said. “But that was based solely on looking at the number of tests we know we have to run today. Tomorrow, when you upgrade a weapon system or we put designs for a new weapon system on the table, in all likelihood the requirement will grow. But the initial plan is for at least 50.”