Lockheed Martin working on new missile defense system

Gray and ominous, topped by radar turrets and satellite dishes, the USS Rancocas looks so like a warship that it just might glide one day through the cornfields of Moorestown and out to sea.

Up close, however, the landmark "cruiser in a cornfield" on Lockheed Martin Corp.'s vast campus reveals itself to be something of a scarecrow: a 122-foot-high deckhouse atop a gunless shed. Although a commissioned vessel of the U.S. Navy housing advanced combat equipment, it will always be a test site in landlocked Moorestown.

A boxy, four-story building that arose here over the winter is another matter.

As with the 36-year-old Rancocas, Lockheed Martin created the new structure - also called a "deckhouse" - to test features of its Aegis surface-to-air missile defense system, which the firm designs and builds in Moorestown.

But next year the top three floors of the new building known as Production Test Center No. 2 will be disassembled and shipped to Eastern Europe as part of the United States' recently expanded land-based approach to missile defense in Europe.

It may never look as cool as Rancocas, but PTC2 will be a true warrior, capable of detecting incoming missile threats, tracking their trajectories, and shooting them and their payloads out of the sky.

"This is rocket science," Brendan Scanlon, director of Lockheed Martin's Aegis Ashore program, joked during a tour last week of the newest building on the 395-acre campus.

Built of massive steel I-beams, with floors made of thick, steel deckplate, the building's bare, brick-red interior looks permanent enough to withstand Armageddon.

"But it has to be relocatable," explained Scanlon, who pointed out one of the many junctures of beams and flooring throughout the building. Instead of welds and rivets, PTC2 is held together by bolted plates that can be unbolted for disassembly and reassembly wherever it's needed.

Just how quickly such buildings, which sit on concrete pads, can be relocated is classified information, Scanlon said. "But it's very fast."

Destined for service in Romania, PTC2 will scan the skies for missile threats 24 hours a day, just like the 84 Aegis-equipped U.S. Navy ships that today roam the high seas.

Sixteen ships of U.S. allies also carry Aegis technology. On Friday South Korea sent two Aegis-equipped destroyers to each of its coasts as an increasingly bellicose North Korea moved toward a test of a medium-range of missile.

A marriage of radar and computer technologies, the missile defense system now known as the Airborne Early-warning Ground Environment Integration Segment (AEGIS) was initially developed in Moorestown in the mid-1960s by the Radio Corporation of America.

The shedlike building nicknamed the "cruiser in a cornfield" was built in the 1950s by the U.S. Air Force, and originally sported a big, white radar dome.

The Navy acquired the site in 1977 and installed the towering superstructure that still startles drivers who see it for the first time. Designed for a nuclear cruiser that was never built, it became the model for Navy's Burke class of destroyer that is still in production.

In 1985, the General Electric Corp acquired RCA and Aegis (the acronym spells a Greek word for shield) which it sold to the Martin Marietta Corp. in 1992. A merger formed Lockheed Martin in 1995.

Partly in response to threats posed by Iranian short- and medium-range missiles, President Obama in 2009 announced creation of a 10-year "phased adaptive approach" to improved missile defense in Europe, based on a land-based Aegis system.

While housed differently, these carry radar and computer arrays identical to ship-based systems, said Scanlon. "That means economy and speed" of production.

On the ground floor of PTC2 he pointed out the dozens of aluminum pallets, some with built-in cooling equipment and cable conduits, that workers have been loading with refrigerator-sized gray computers, processors, and command-and-control consoles with padded chairs and triple-screen displays.

"Reactor ready" reads a cryptic button on some boxes.

On the top floor, the western wall contained a 12-by-12 foot flat radar array, shaped like a shield, that is the eye and external signature of an Aegis combat system. Cranes will hoist three more arrays into the other walls next week.

Although each installation should only take a day, "a lot of engineering went in to make that happen," said Scanlon. "It's all about risk reduction."

Once in place and tested as an integrated system, all the pallets and radar arrays are to be shipped in July to the U.S. Navy base at Kauai, Hawaii. There they will be installed in a building identical to PTC2 that will serve as a permanent test site.

Once the Hawaii-bound equipment departs, workers will start installing another set of palletized modules and arrays at the Moorestown building. After testing, they and the disassembled building will be transported next year to Romania.

Last month, the Navy announced it had awarded a $100 million, five-year contract to Lockheed Martin to develop the next generation of the Aegis combat system, already in its ninth iteration.

Scanlon said Lockheed Martin anticipates the U.S. Missile Defense Agency will announce plans to contract for another land-based missile defense site in Poland.

"The rocket science has not changed from what we do at sea," said Scanlon. "We're just packaging it differently."