Boeing Co is working with the
U.S. Missile Defense Agency to address quality and reliability issues
with the sharply criticized $41 billion homeland missile defence system
by adopting controls from space programs, a company official said.
Craig Cooning, named four months ago to head the Boeing
division that includes satellites and missile defence, told Reuters in
an interview on Monday that he was working out a new approach to the
system with Missile Defense Agency Director Vice Admiral James Syring.
"With Admiral Syring, we are looking to make what we do
in missile defence more like space programs and less like defence
weapons programs. There’s a higher design reliability in space than
there historically has been in some weapons programs," he said.
U.S. officials and several reports have been critical
of the lack of a rigorous systems engineering approach in the
Ground-based Midcourse Defense (GMD) system run by Boeing, and linked it
to repeated intercept failures.
Some of the issues with the GMD system stem from a
decision to deploy it in 2004 before it completed testing to counter
what former President George W. Bush identified as a looming North
Korean missile threat, Cooning said.
The new approach would adopt more of the redundant
systems, higher design reliability and screening procedures used for
military space systems, which are held to a higher standard given the
mammoth costs and technologies involved, he said.
Cooning said the restructuring effort would also
benefit from advances in technology, such as increased computer
processing power and a greater understanding of the efforts of radiation
on the system.
He declined comment when asked if Boeing's payments for
the system had been docked as a result of past problems, saying only
that the overall business was "financially sound."
Cooning said he expected the Pentagon's fiscal 2016
budget to fund an effort to improve the reliability of the current "kill
vehicle" built by Raytheon Co , which intercepts and destroys missiles
above the earth's atmosphere.
An investigation completed in September by the
Pentagon's inspector general found dozens of quality control issues with
the troubled Raytheon vehicle, including with software testing, supply
chain requirements and design changes. Boeing, Raytheon and Lockheed Martin Corp have said they plan to compete for that work.
The GMD system and Raytheon's Exoatmospheric Kill
Vehicle (EKV) completed their first successful intercept test in June
after years of failures.
