Washington: The US Missile Defence Agency has chosen Northrop Grumman to design an interceptor capable of defeating hypersonic weapons in the glide phase of flight, the agency announced.
MDA director Lt Gen Heath Collins revealed earlier this summer that the agency would soon choose between Raytheon and Northrop who were competing to design the Glide Phase Interceptor, or GPI. Lockheed Martin was one of three original companies picked to work on design concepts for GPI in November 2021 but by June 2022, MDA had chosen to proceed with only Northrop and Raytheon.
MDA made the decision in favour of Northrop together with the Japanese government, which is signed on to co-develop the capability.
The company’s win comes after it recently lost another big MDA competition to develop the Next-Generation Interceptor that will replace interceptors that make up the Ground-Based Midcourse Defence System. That system is designed to defend the continental US from intercontinental ballistic missile threats from North Korea and Iran. Lockheed Martin was chosen earlier this year in another early down select.
The decision to move to just a single vendor prior to reaching preliminary design review is out of the ordinary, but Collins said last month that MDA, like the rest of the Defence Department, had “to make really tough prioritisation and resource-informed decisions. … We were no exception, so we had to take a look at how we balance and make decisions on the capability we bring.”
Northrop Grumman said in a statement that during the next phase of GPI development, it will continue to refine its preliminary design intended to fire from the US Navy’s Aegis Ballistic Missile Defence destroyers and Aegis Ashore using the standard Vertical Launch System.
The company will move quickly by using digital engineering. It plans to demonstrate system performance in hypersonic environments before the preliminary design review and complete flight experiments early, according to the statement.
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