The Ministry of Defence has awarded a £20 million contract to Lockheed Martin UK to deliver Project Bowline, a hypersonic target programme supporting the development and testing of missile defence systems against advanced threats, according to an answer given in Parliament.
Ben Obese-Jecty, the Conservative member for Huntingdon, asked which company is developing Project Bowline.
Luke Pollard, the Minister of State for Defence, said: “The Ministry of Defence awarded a £20 million contract to Lockheed Martin UK to deliver Project Bowline, a hypersonic target programme designed to support the development and testing of missile defence systems against advanced threats.”
Nothing in missile defence can be proved without a target to shoot at. An interceptor must be tested against something that behaves like the threat, and a hypersonic glide vehicle or manoeuvring reentry vehicle behaves very differently from the ballistic targets Western ranges have used for decades. Flying something at those speeds, on those trajectories, repeatably and safely, is a serious engineering problem in its own right.
Britain has not previously had a sovereign capability of this kind, and the requirement follows from Russian and Chinese fielding of weapons designed to complicate interception, including the Russian Kinzhal and Zircon and the Chinese DF-17, and from British work on counter-hypersonic effectors running alongside the Team Hypersonics programme that covers offensive systems.
At £20 million this is a development and demonstration programme and not a production order for a target fleet, which is the normal sequence at this stage, and the output is likely to be a small number of flights that establish whether the approach works.
