While it has fixed the bad welds that plagued the program last decade, BWX Technologies, Lynchburg, Va., is still having trouble manufacturing common missile compartment tubes for Columbia-, Virginia– and Dreadnought-class submarines, the company’s CEO said this week.
“[W]e continue to have some struggles with the missile tubes program,” Rex Geveden, BWX Technologies’ (BWXT) chief executive, said Monday in the company’s second quarter earnings call with investors. “[W]e did experience some cost creep in that program last year and we brought in some new leadership, and they’ve re-baselined the program and estimated some new costs to ramp that program up.”
Geveden did not quantify the effects of missile tube missteps on the company’s second quarter financial performance, though the company’s latest earnings press release said that even with the “lower missile tube revenue due to contract adjustments,” quarterly revenue in the flagship government operations segment still rose 8% year over year to $437 million.
BWXT makes Common Missile Compartment tubes at its factory in Mount Vernon, Ind. The tubes are designed to fit the U.S. Virginia-class attack submarines and Columbia-class ballistic missile submarines, plus the United Kingdom’s planned Dreadnought-class ballistic missile submarines.
Each country’s ballistic missile submarines are nuclear powered and carry Lockhed Martin-made Trident II missiles tipped with W76 and W88 nuclear warheads on the U.S. boats and Trident-Holbrook warheads, a W76 derivative, on the U.K. boats.
In 2018, the Navy acknowledged that BWXT incorrectly welded a dozen missile tubes that the company was building as a subcontractor to Columbia-class prime General Dynamics Electric Boat.
The mistake chewed the prime’s margin to construct and launch the first Columbia boat to about two months, the Navy said in November. The first Columbia is supposed to go on patrol in 2031 or so. The U.S. Navy plans to replace its current fleet of 14 Ohio-class ballistic missile submarines with 12 Columbia boats.
