Northrop Grumman does “static fire test” on Sentinel ICBM

The U.S. Air Force said that the service and Northrop Grumman conducted “a full-scale qualification static fire test of the Sentinel intercontinental ballistic missile stage-one solid rocket motor” on Thursday at the company’s site in Promontory, Utah. 

Northrop Grumman is building the LGM-35A Sentinel intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) to replace the Minuteman III ICBM as the land leg of the nuclear triad. 

“This critical milestone further validates the motor’s design and paves the way for the production and deployment of a safe, secure and reliable strategic deterrent,” according to the Air Force Nuclear Weapons Center at Kirtland Air Force Base, N.M. “This test confirms the accuracy of digital engineering models and brings the stage-one solid rocket motor closer to achieving full qualification.”

The Nuclear Weapons Center added that this test follows static fire tests “of the second and third stages,” and said the test results are “currently being analyzed by a team of experts from the Air Force Nuclear Weapons Center and Northrop Grumman.” 

On Jan. 18 last year, the Air Force said that it notified Congress that Sentinel had breached Nunn-McCurdy guidelines, primarily due to construction design changes. The program has continued, but last summer DoD pulled Sentinel back from the engineering and manufacturing development stage, which the Pentagon had approved for the next generation ICBM in 2020.

Meanwhile, as of January of this year, a stockpile management official at the National Nuclear Security Administration told the Monitor that within the next year “one, perhaps both” of the W87 missiles — the W87-0 which is already in the stockpile and would fly first on the Sentinel, and the W87-1 that would fly next — would do a test flight on a non-Sentinel missile.

A version of this story was first published by Exchange Monitor affiliate Defense Daily.