U.S. Taps Northrup Grumman for US$53.1 Million Solid-State Laser Project

29 October 2015—The Office of Naval Research (ONR), U.S. Department of Defense (DoD), has announced that it has selected Northrop Grumman Space and Mission Systems Corp. to lead the initial phases of ONR’s Solid State High Power Laser Weapon System Demonstrator (LWSD) program. The value of the initial contract is US$53.1 million—but that could rise to US$91 million if DoD elects to exercise additional options on the contract in Northrop Grumman’s favor.
 
The LWSD project comes on the heels of the successful  three-month field test of the Navy Laser Weapons System (LaWS) on the naval vessel USS Ponce in the Persian Gulf, beginning in August 2014 (see “High-Energy Lasers: New Advances in Defense Applications,” Optics & Photonics News, October 2014). Those tests resulted, according to the Navy, in “the first-ever fully approved laser weapon system deployed by any U.S. military service.” ONR hopes to build on that success by using the new LWSD project to refine and optimize the characteristics of these directed-energy devices, including power, beam quality, and maintainability, for shipboard use, and to “improve the lethality” of existing laser weapons and take the next step in maturing them into systems that can be more widely deployed.
 
The contract with Northrop Grumman is a cost-plus-fixed-fee agreement expected to be completed one year from now, and covering research, development, technical maturation and testing. If the government exercises its option to extend the contract, the remainder of the work would run through July 2018, and would culminate in at-sea testing on the Navy’s Self-Defense Test Ship.