Lockheed Martin [LMT] said Wednesday it successfully passed another Missile Defense Agency (MDA) acquisition milestone in the Next Generation Interceptor competition as it barrels towards Critical Design Review (CDR) in 2025.
This latest achievement, called the first Knowledge Point, or KP1, had MDA evaluate the company’s NGI development progress thus far.
The company said this entailed an agency evaluation of it completing design review milestones and demonstrating maturation across critical technologies, manufacturing readiness and utility of Lockheed Martin’s NGI factory.
“I’m proud of the technical rigor our Lockheed Martin and industry team demonstrated. We proved at KP1 that we have reached a level of maturity unprecedented at this stage of a missile defense program,” Sarah Reeves, vice president of NGI at Lockheed Martin, said in a statement.
“With MDA’s approval, we have turned a corner into our detailed design phase and will keep testing our integrated NGI hardware and software in preparation for production and flight testing,” she continued.
MDA’s NGI program aims to upgrade and replace the current older model 44 Ground Based Interceptors (GBIs) used by the Ground-based Midcourse Defense (GMD) system to defend against a small number of nuclear weapons on intercontinental ballistic missiles. GMD is primarily aimed at North Korean capabilities.
MDA chose Lockheed Martin and Northrop Grumman [NOC] in 2021 to start to conduct initial technology development and risk reduction work for NGI (Defense Daily, March 21, 2021).
Reeves told Defense Daily in a statement that MDA uses these Knowledge Points “ to measure development progress in its acquisition process. Each Knowledge Point, when closed, marks the completion of a set of critical event-driven risk-reduction activities.”
The company said it completed and passed KP1 ahead of schedule, however, it would not disclose how far ahead of schedule.
“This means that at this point we have advanced in MDA’s acquisition process, meeting requirements to pass PDR and moving toward [All-Up Round] CDR. KP1 is one gate we must get through before CDR. In fact, Lockheed Martin has already closed some CDRs for elements within our NGI solution,” Reeves added.
KP1 follows the company’s completion of the digital All-Up Round preliminary design review (PDR) in September (Defense Daily, Oct. 16, 2023).
At that time, the company said its following steps were to start procuring long-lead hardware to support manufacturing NGI flight test vehicles and to move into the Critical Design Review milestone by the third quarter of fiscal year 2025.
Reeves explained that to complete KP1 Lockheed Martin had to inform MDA of its progress finishing things like closing System Requirements Review (SRR); completing parts and prototype testing for sensors, radio frequency communication systems, boosters and propulsion; demonstrate their software factors amid initial deliveries from the software factory for NGI and closing the PDR.
In 2022, the company announced it delivered the first flight software package for its NGI offering ahead of schedule.
Reeves said the software team is still building on that initial Release 0 milestone, “adding additional functionality and using metrics from the software factory for continuous development and to increase productivity.”
Before Lockheed Martin reaches CDR in FY 2025, it still needs to execute subsystem CDRs and KP2.
In KP2, MDA will assess the company’s NGI program finished sub-assembly qualification and performance assessment of “critical All-Up Round elements,” Reeves said.
CDR then follows KP2 and leads to MDA’s acquisition process and then to the third Knowledge Point, KP3.
Lockheed Martin said it is currently building ground test vehicles and virtually flying the interceptor during system integration trials.
If selected for the program, Lockheed Martin expects to start delivering NGIs as soon as fiscal year 2027.
In August, competitor Northrop Grumman announced it successfully built the first set of solid rocket motor cases for all three stages of its NGI and planned to start static firing of the solid rockets by the end of 2023 (Defense Daily, Aug. 8, 2023).
Also at the time, then-acting director of MDA, Rear Adm. Douglas Williams, said MDA planned to start testing the eventual NGI winner in 2027, with operational testing of NGI planned around 2029. (Defense Daily, Aug. 10, 2023).
NGIs are not expected to be deployed in bulk until the mid-2030s at the current development and expected production rates, even as the two offerors and MDA look to accelerate development by up to a year.