The W80-4 warhead will stay on schedule, despite the cost breach of its delivery vehicle the B-52 bomber, Sandia National Laboratories director Laura McGill said during an online press conference Wednesday.
“It is really critical that we deliver that system on time,” McGill said while answering a question by sister publication The Exchange Monitor
on how last week’s announcement of a B-52 Nunn-McCurdy breach would affect schedules for the W80-4. A Nunn-McCurdy breach means a project is 15% over the baseline cost.
Boeing’s [BA] B-52H will be the first aircraft to carry the RTX [RTX] Long Range Standoff (LRSO) Missile, which eventually will fly aboard the B-21 Raider bomber that Northrop Grumman [NOC] is building. The National Nuclear Security Administration’s (NNSA) is refurbishing the W80-4 warhead, through a life extension program, to tip the LRSO.
McGill said the cost breach, along with engine upgrades and modernization of the aircraft, “may affect our ability to conduct some of our final flight testing, but I will say that we expect we’ll be able to continue our work in collaboration with Raytheon that’s delivering the long-range standoff weapon that the W80-4 goes into.”
McGill added, “the program is on track at this point, and we expect that we will be prepared to meet the first production unit, as well as being very prepared to scale up to full production under the current baseline schedule.”
According to NNSA’s stockpile stewardship and management plan (SSMP) for fiscal 2025, which was released in early October, the W80-4 program would complete its final design reviews by fiscal year 2025, which began Oct. 1. The SSMP also said the first production unit of the W80-4 would be complete in fiscal 2027.
James Peery, the previous Sandia director, told the Monitor in January that the W80-4 had its first flight test on the LRSO earlier that month. Peery added it was the first flight test for the W80-4, and that there was a flight test the week before that was also successful. The test was without any special nuclear materials, and that the test was “nominal,” he said.
Peery also said at a conference in January that he was “pretty excited right now” that the laboratory and the NNSA had worked with the Air Force on testing the warhead on the missile.