Lockheed Martin [LMT] on Wednesday won a $784 million contract from the Missile Defense Agency to develop and produce a Long Range Discrimination Radar, a ground-based system designed to differentiate between ballistic missiles threats and decoys.
The LRDR will help increase homeland security by buoying MDA’s ballistic missile defense system, said Brad Hicks, Lockheed’s vice president of business development for integrated warfare systems and sensor.
It is scheduled to deploy to Clear Air Force Station, Alaska, and become operational in 2020, he said in a conference call with reporters. “That’s a very rapid development and delivery.”
The company plans to complete system, preliminary and critical design reviews early enough to give it margin for when it has to construct the system in Alaska, but Hicks declined to comment on specific milestones. Once complete, Lockheed’s two faced array radar will be 30 feet tall and roughly the size of four semi-truck trailers.
“As threats evolve and get more complex, the ability to discern objects—whether they’re valid objects or it’s a lethal reentry vehicle—becomes more important to keep the effectiveness of the ground based interceptors in place,” he said.
Lockheed was able to leverage past work for its LRDR offering, he said. MDA asked for a high operational availability, which was also critical for Aegis ballistic missile defense system and the Space Fence surveillance system that will track objects in the Earth’s orbit. The company also drew from projects like Aegis Ashore in Romania, which required building a large, complex radar that would be housed in a remote environment.
Raytheon [RTN] and Northrop Grumman [NOC] also submitted bids for the contract.