Jane Edwards
Northrop Grumman and the Missile Defense Agency completed a preliminary design review of the Next Generation Interceptor capability one year ahead of schedule.
As part of PDR, the Northrop NGI team provided MDA with a full-scale solid rocket motor, avionics, test hardware and other on-site interactive demonstrators for assessment as well as a digital model of the all-up round design in a virtual reality environment, the company said Wednesday.
“We put actual hardware in the hands of the MDA, backed by a digital representation. Next Generation Interceptor holds global strategic importance, which is why production and manufacturing readiness continues to play a central role in our Next Generation Interceptor solution,” said Lisa Brown, vice president of the NGI program at Northrop.
As Northrop’s partner in the NGI program, RTX business Raytheon supplied sensor hardware, test equipment and kill vehicle hardware used during environmental testing.
“As a part of this review, our high-fidelity simulations demonstrated how Next Generation Interceptor’s multiple kill vehicles will perform in the extreme conditions of space, defeating an increasingly advanced set of missile threats,” said Jennifer Gauthier, deputy president of air and space defense systems at Raytheon.
NGI is part of MDA’s Ground-Based Midcourse Defense system designed to defend the U.S. against intercontinental ballistic missile threats and is expected to be fielded by 2027.
Northrop will continue to further develop its NGI design to move the capability to the critical design review phase.
