Defense news:
WASHINGTON — The Pentagon has moved from taking a “strategic pause” on the Redesigned Kill Vehicle (RKV) program to outright killing it.
DOD decided to terminate the current Boeing contract to develop the RKV — effective August 22 — “due to technical design problems,” according to an August 21 Pentagon statement.
The RKV would have replaced the current Exoatmospheric Kill Vehicle (EKV) on the Ground-Based Interceptor, which makes up the Ground-Based Midcourse Defense System (GMD) designed to protect the homeland from ballistic missile threats from North Korea and Iran. It would have also been fielded on all future GBIs — a total of 64 ultimately.
The EKV is designed to destroy targets in high-speed collisions after separating from the booster rocket.
The EKV required technical changes in the past several years due to issues in tests and the Missile Defense Agency decided to initiate a program to redesign the kill vehicle. In the meantime, MDA has had several successful tests of the GMD system with the EKV following some engineering changes.
