Lockheed Martin has reached a new milestone in its Next Generation Interceptor initiative with the conclusion of its digital All Up Round Preliminary Design Review.

The completion of this testing phase, which was conducted in collaboration with the U.S. Missile Defense Agency, indicates that Lockheed is on track to deliver NGI to the military services on an accelerated timeline, the company announced from Huntsville, Alabama on Monday.

“I am proud of our team’s commitment to innovating with urgency to achieve expectations for this phase of the program,” said Sarah Hiza, vice president and general manager of strategic and missile defense at Lockheed Martin.

According to Hiza, the added confidence in the design gained from the joint review has kept the program on schedule.

A developing component of the MDA’s Ground-based Midcourse Defense system, NGI will offer a modern interceptor to deter long range ballistic missile threats from U.S. adversaries. During the Preliminary Design Review, or PDR, the MDA considered the NGI program’s readiness and maturity to determine that the technology still meets the requirements for this mission.

The review was carried out using digital engineering and model-based engineering tools that increased cost-effectiveness. These digital review methods allowed for early and repeated hardware and software testing, which secured the PDR with lab demonstrations of flight-like engineering hardware.

With the conclusion of this testing stage, Lockheed will start procuring long-lead hardware for use in the production of flight test vehicles. The next phase of the process, the Critical Design Review, is expected to occur in the third quarter of fiscal year 2025, and Lockheed projects the delivery of NGI to begin as early as fiscal year 2027. NGI’s previous milestone, the PDR of core subsystems, was completed in August.

NASA has pushed back the first flight of its X-59 quiet supersonic research aircraft — manufactured by Lockheed Martin’s Skunk Works subsidiary — to 2024.

The X-59 aircraft will fly as part of NASA’s Quesst experimental mission that aims to demonstrate technology that can fly faster than the speed of sound while reducing the loudness of sonic booms to a quiet thump, the agency said Thursday.

According to NASA, the new flight schedule will give the agency extra time to fully integrate aircraft components and ensure system performance.

The Quesst team has transported the aircraft from its assembly facility to the flight line to commence safety and structural testing.

Rep. Mike Rogers, R-Ala., chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, called for rapid changes to the U.S. strategic posture to deter two near-peer nuclear adversaries in the future, citing a recent report from the Strategic Posture Commission that examined the long-term strategic posture of the United States.

“The results of their report detailed the gravity of the situation we face and emphasized that the current trajectory of the US nuclear deterrent is insufficient to deter the looming Chinese and Russian threat,” Rogers said in a statement published Thursday.

The HASC chair highlighted key takeaways including the absolute necessity of the nuclear force modernization program and the need for it to be supplemented to meet new Russian and Chinese threats; the expansion of the size of the U.S. nuclear stockpile and delivery systems; and the nuclear force size and composition and its ability to simultaneously deter both countries.

Rogers also reiterated some recommendations detailed in the report: “The Commission recommends Congress fund an overhaul and expansion of the capacity of the U.S. nuclear weapons defense industrial base and the Department of Energy/National Nuclear Security Administration nuclear security enterprise… [and] the United States urgently deploy a more resilient space architecture and adopt a strategy that includes both offensive and defensive elements to ensure U.S. access to and operations in space.”

The U.S. Army is implementing an intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance architecture modernization strategy that includes quantum computing and commercial satellite communications for the space, terrestrial and aerial domains, branch officials told attendees of the Association of the United States Army conference.

Leaders including Lt. Gen. Laura Potter, Army deputy chief of staff for intelligence, and Andrew Evans, director of the Army’s ISR Task Force, expounded on the Army Field Manual FM 2.0 – Intelligence doctrine published earlier this month.

Potter explained that the service branch’s ISR transformation will take place in “three layers: the space layer, taking advantage of government and commercial space based resources; an aerial layer that’s a mix of manned HADES [High Accuracy Detection and Exploitation System] aircraft and unmanned platforms; and then a terrestrial layer that has terrestrial layer sensing at the brigade level and echelons above brigade.”

The ISR Task Force is considering whether to continue using traditional means of obtaining data and analysis or purchase them from commercial satellite providers, which are increasingly deploying their systems on orbit.

“We’re talking about swarming using autonomy as fast as we can and proliferating it as wide as we can. Autonomy is gonna be key in the future,” Evans said. “We’re also talking about how we manage all of the data, because that’s going to be a tall order.”