Northrop Grumman’s Next Generation Interceptor (NGI) team completed its Preliminary Design Review one year earlier than the original contract date. (Credit: Northrop Grumman)
ORLANDO — The Missile Defense Agency (MDA) has given Northrop Grumman a thumbs up to continue with its design approach under the Next Generation Interceptor (NGI) program — putting the company’s prototype effort a year ahead of its original schedule, according to a Northrop Grumman official.
“We passed PDR [preliminary design review] last week, Jan. 26. That is over a year ahead of our contract schedule, and also ahead of what we committed to MDA we were going to do,” Lisa Brown, NGI program head at Northrop, told Breaking Defense on Tuesday. “We pulled it left by about a month or so.”
The PDR “established the technical approach for the full integration of Northrop’s interceptor design across all its subsystems to move into more advanced phases of development. A key requirement of this milestone is demonstrating that the design would maintain full capability while surviving challenging environments,” the company said in a press release today.
Brown explained that as well as “digitally reviewing” the NGI design plans, officials from MDA and Office of the Secretary of Defense also participated in a company “science fair,” where they “actually put hands on the hardware and perhaps better understand some of the technologies that we incorporate in the interceptor.”
MDA awarded development contracts to the two teams — Northrop, partnered with Raytheon (now RTX), and Lockheed Martin, partnered with Aerojet Rocketdyne — in 2021. The program’s original goal was to begin fielding the new interceptor by 2028. The agency is now expecting to be able to start initial field testing by 2027.
The next step for the companies will be critical design review (CDR). Brown said Northrop is expecting that to happen for them in spring of 2025. Lockheed Martin, which passed PDR in October, said at the time the company expects their CDR to go forward sometime between July and September 2025.
MDA is expected to stage a down-select to one of the prototypes following the CRD cycle.
The agency currently plans to buy 20 NGIs to augment the current Ground-Based Interceptors (GBIs) making up the Ground-Based Midcourse Defense (GMD) program. It is designed to defend the US homeland from “rogue” North Korean or Iranian ICBM attacks. NGI is one of MDA’s biggest planned investments in its FY24 budget at $2.1 billion, which the agency’s budget overview says “features a multiple kill vehicle payload.”
