STEPHEN TRIMBLE / WASHINGTON DC
Lockheed Martin has won an eight-year contract worth up to $768 million to develop a miniature kill vehicle (MKV) interceptor for the US Missile Defense Agency (MDA).
The company on 7 January received an initial 11-month task order worth $27 million to launch development of the new hit-to-kill weapon in fiscal year 2004. The first MKV hover test is due in FY05, and the first flight test in 2009.
The MKV effort aims to deploy an affordable system to tackle sophisticated threats in the 2010 timeframe. The baseline concept involves enclosing multiple kill vehicles within a carrier vehicle similar in size to today's Raytheon-made single-shot exoatmospheric kill vehicle, according to Lockheed Martin Space Systems' vice-president Doug Graham.
Acting as a "mother ship", the MKV carrier vehicle will acquire the target and discriminate the warhead from any countermeasures, before transmitting tracking data to each of the small interceptors on board.
The carrier vehicle will then deploy each of its interceptors from a stand-off range of hundreds of kilometres, and provide a mid-course update capability against countermeasures and multiple ballistic missile threats.
The MDA rejected bids by Raytheon and a Boeing/Shafer team in favour of the Lockheed Martin-led bid, which also includes L-3 Coleman Aerospace, Davidson Enterprises and BAE Systems. Lockheed Martin has previously received a $4.2 billion contract to provide the MDA with a family of target and countermeasures systems for use during missile defence tests.
Source: Flight International