HUNTSVILLE, Ala., In November 2023, Lockheed Martin successfully completed a Missile Defense Agency (MDA) acquisition milestone for the nation’s modernized long range ballistic missile interceptor. The company completed the first Knowledge Point – known as KP1 – ahead of schedule, taking a major contractual step forward that allows its Next Generation Interceptor (NGI) program to continue development towards the Critical Design Review (CDR).

During KP1, the MDA evaluated Lockheed Martin’s development progress to date. This includes completing design review milestones and demonstrating significant maturation across critical technologies, manufacturing readiness, and utility of the company’s NGI Software Factory. This KP1 achievement follows the program’s All Up Round Preliminary Design Review, which Lockheed Martin executed on-schedule in September.

“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,” said Sarah Reeves, vice president of NGI at Lockheed Martin. “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.”

The company remains on its accelerated path to the next engineering milestone, CDR. Current work includes building ground test vehicles and virtually flying the interceptor during system integration trials, enabled by our digital engineering tool suite.

NGI is designed to deter and defeat evolving rogue-nation long range ballistic missile threats to the U.S. homeland. The first Lockheed Martin NGI is forecast for delivery to the warfighter as early as Fiscal Year 2027.