Washington Business Journal:
Lockheed Martin Corp. said Tuesday it had reached a key technical milestone with a new missile defense system.
The company’s Long Range Discrimination Radar, known as LRDR, completed what’s called a closed-loop satellite track — successfully searching for, acquiring and tracking numerous satellites across their entire field of view and processing the data using its tactical software and back-end signal processing equipment.
What that means is that Bethesda-based Lockheed (NYSE: LMT), the world’s largest defense contractor, has designed and produced a scaled LRDR system that is running with the actual processing equipment and software (featuring more than 3 million lines of code). This means the system is ready to proceed to full-rate manufacturing and is on schedule to deliver on time, LRDR Program Director Chandra Marshall said in a statement.
The company will deliver its final software build to the Missile Defense Agency (MDA) at the end of October. Today’s news means Lockheed is ready to proceed to full-rate manufacturing.