The Northrop Grumman Corporation Next Generation Interceptor team completed its All-Up Round (AUR) Preliminary Design Review (PDR), in partnership with the Missile Defense Agency (MDA) on January 26. Meeting the demands of the mission, the Northrop Grumman Next Generation Interceptor team continues to accelerate the progress on deploying a critical homeland defense capability to the U.S. warfighter. The PDR established the technical approach for the full integration of Northrop Grumman?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 Northrop Grumman team provided on-site interactive demonstrators for review by MDA, including a full-scale solid rocket motor, avionics, and other test hardware. The Next Generation Interceptor team?s strategic partner Raytheon, an RTX business, provided kill vehicle hardware used during environmental testing, sensor hardware, kill vehicle hardware that supports manufacturing fixtures, and test equipment.

Also available at the Northrop Grumman PDR was a full-scale digital model of the AUR design in a virtual reality environment. The Northrop Grumman NGI solution will provide enhanced technical capabilities that would be used to defend the U.S. homeland from Intercontinental Ballistic Missile (ICBM) threats as part of the Ground-Based Midcourse Defense (GMD) system. The team has built and tested key components of Next Generation Interceptor solution, ahead of customer timelines.

The Northrop Grumman team, along with Raytheon, is implementing advanced digital engineering techniques to reduce the time needed to advance the design through phases of maturity and reach operational capability as quickly as possible. Following the successful completion of PDR, Northrop Grumman will continue maturing its NGI design on the path to its Critical Design Review, which is expected to be completed ahead of schedule. The first operational Next Generation Interceptor is forecast to be deployed as early as 2027.