Northrop Grumman and the Air Force have completed a critical design review for the launch support system of the LGM-35A Sentinel future intercontinental ballistic missile, the defense contractor said Monday.
The launch support system is a digital command and control infrastructure for Sentinel operations and launches. According to the press release, the review was executed on time.
Now that the critical design review (CDR) is complete, the program can build the launch support system in Roy, Utah, and then deploy it at Vandenberg Space Force Base in California.
“The successful completion of the CDR means we can now build, test, and qualify the system that will ensure the U.S. Air Force can reliably say, ‘Go for launch,’” Sarah WIlloughby, vice president and general manager of strategic deterrent systems at Northrop Grumman, said in the release. “By advancing the Sentinel program, we are addressing one of the nation’s most critical deterrence missions, providing resilient and dependable capabilities to safeguard our country’s future.”
Sentinel is an intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) that will eventually replace the Boeing-made Minuteman III as the Air Force’s silo-based, nuclear-armed ICBM. That is expected sometime in the 2030s while the Minuteman III is still commissioned. The new missile will initially carry W87-0 warheads provided by the National Nuclear Security Administration’s Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California, before transitioning to the W87-1 warheads being made at Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico
The Senate Armed Services Committee’s version of the fiscal 2026 national defense authorization bill would require Sentinel to reach initial operational capability by the end of fiscal 2033.
The Sentinel program is undergoing a restructuring to allow it, once again, to enter engineering and manufacturing development (EMD) – a 2020 EMD go ahead that DoD rescinded in July last year after the program had a critical Nunn-McCurdy program unit cost breach. A new EMD decision may come by January next year.