Aegis

The U.S. Navy has approved a new easier-to-upgrade version the Aegis Ballistic Missile Defense System that opens opportunities for small technology companies. The announcement was made yesterday by the 5,500-person Lockheed Martin Corp. complex in Moorestown, where Aegis has been developed over the last 30 years. "We have broken computer programs into modular components," said Sue Huelster, technical director on the project. This open architecture in three key areas of the system allows Lockheed Martin to take "best-in-breed components from small business and insert it more rapidly into Aegis," Huelster said.

Even with North Korea threatening nuclear war, the mood was jubilant - even cocky - at Moorestown's Lockheed Martin Corp. plant Thursday as employees and public officials celebrated a new $100 million contract for its Aegis antimissile defense system. The Navy recently announced that Lockheed Martin was the victor in a fierce competition to design and build its next generation of Aegis: a computer-guided radar system that can detect incoming missile threats and guides the surface-to-air missiles that would shoot them down.

The Aegis Ballistic Missile Defense system, developed and refined in Moorestown over 30 years, knocked out two incoming short-range-missile test targets at the same time, Lockheed Martin Corp. said yesterday. The test, conducted Tuesday night over the Pacific Ocean, was "a very challenging event . . . the first time we're simultaneously engaging two ballistic missiles," Joe Rappisi, Aegis program director in Moorestown, said in a conference call before the exercise. In earlier tests, Aegis simultaneously destroyed incoming ballistic- and cruise-missile targets.

He was known for his mottos: "Build a little, test a little, learn a lot. " He used to say that "engineering is 'plod, plod, plod' " and that "we ain't done yet. " Navy Rear Adm. Wayne E. Meyer, regarded as the father of the Aegis missile-defense system, drove testing of the technology at the former RCA facility in Moorestown and changed the face of naval warfare. Last year, Aegis was used to shoot down a failing U.S. satellite, and it is the centerpiece of the White House's strategy to protect Europe and the United States from Iranian missiles.

The House of Representatives has appropriated $4 billion to build five more Aegis weapons systems, a move that will keep the Moorestown GE assembly lines building radar and related equipment for the program until 1995. Although company officials said they welcomed the news of the appropriation, they stressed that the new contract would not change plans to trim the Moorestown workforce, which earlier this year numbered 4,600, to 3,700 by early 1992, largely through retirements, transfers and attrition.

A plan to save thousands of jobs at the Philadelphia Naval Shipyard by making it a regional center for repairing Navy surface ships equipped with the Aegis weapons system was announced yesterday by the Penjerdel Council. Speaking to business, academic and union leaders at the University City Science Center in West Philadelphia, Penjerdel President Robert C. Wonderling said the proposal could result in 8,000 to 10,000 jobs at the shipyard and make it a "one-stop engineering, overhaul and repair center for the Navy's non-nuclear Aegis fleet" of 50 vessels.

For anyone who regularly travels on the New Jersey Turnpike or Interstate 295, it is a landmark without compare. There, just north of Exit 4 of the turnpike, rising above the flatness of South Jersey, is the gray bridge of a Navy warship attached to the top of a windowless box of a building. Some call it the "Cornfield Cruiser. " It also is known as the USS Rancocas, the only landlocked Navy facility to have been commissioned like a ship at sea. However it might appear to be to the casual observer, this immobile mock-up in Moorestown is constantly advancing on the frontiers of naval combat technology.

When Lockheed Martin Corp.'s unit in South Jersey on Monday lost a Navy contract worth billions, it was more than a blow to corporate earnings. The company's failure to emerge as the designer of weapons systems for the DD(X), the next generation of Navy ships, was terrible news for the Philadelphia region's economy. A contract for Lockheed Martin - one of the region's economic engines - could have meant huge growth and hundreds of new jobs in its Naval Electronics & Surveillance Systems-Surface Systems unit in Moorestown.

Even with North Korea threatening nuclear war, the mood was jubilant - even cocky - at Moorestown's Lockheed Martin Corp. plant Thursday as employees and public officials celebrated a new $100 million contract for its Aegis antimissile defense system. The Navy recently announced that Lockheed Martin was the victor in a fierce competition to design and build its next generation of Aegis: a computer-guided radar system that can detect incoming missile threats and guides the surface-to-air missiles that would shoot them down.

He was known for his mottos: "Build a little, test a little, learn a lot. " He used to say that "engineering is 'plod, plod, plod' " and that "we ain't done yet. " Navy Rear Adm. Wayne E. Meyer, regarded as the father of the Aegis missile-defense system, drove testing of the technology at the former RCA facility in Moorestown and changed the face of naval warfare. Last year, Aegis was used to shoot down a failing U.S. satellite, and it is the centerpiece of the White House's strategy to protect Europe and the United States from Iranian missiles.

Along the way, as it glided by the Delaware Memorial, Commodore Barry, and Walt Whitman Bridges, it drew stares from people in sail and motor boats. Some waved from the city riverfront and the deck of the Battleship New Jersey as the Philadelphia Fire Department fireboat shot its water cannon in celebration. A sleek, state-of-the-art Navy destroyer - with a Philadelphia history - came to town yesterday to begin its service and was gently nudged into place at Penn's Landing by two tugboats.

Using a new version of the Aegis Ballistic Missile Defense System produced by Lockheed Martin Corp.'s Moorestown plant, the Navy detected and destroyed a short-range scudlike target yesterday off Hawaii. It was the first test of the next version of the complex Aegis system, developed at the Burlington County plant where 5,500 people work. The test shows the new Aegis version "can now kill a missile in space and kill a missile in the final 30 to 70 seconds of flight," Rear Adm. Brad Hicks, the Pentagon's Aegis program director, told reporters in a conference call.

The U.S. Navy has approved a new easier-to-upgrade version the Aegis Ballistic Missile Defense System that opens opportunities for small technology companies. The announcement was made yesterday by the 5,500-person Lockheed Martin Corp. complex in Moorestown, where Aegis has been developed over the last 30 years. "We have broken computer programs into modular components," said Sue Huelster, technical director on the project. This open architecture in three key areas of the system allows Lockheed Martin to take "best-in-breed components from small business and insert it more rapidly into Aegis," Huelster said.

The Aegis Ballistic Missile Defense system, developed and refined in Moorestown over 30 years, knocked out two incoming short-range-missile test targets at the same time, Lockheed Martin Corp. said yesterday. The test, conducted Tuesday night over the Pacific Ocean, was "a very challenging event . . . the first time we're simultaneously engaging two ballistic missiles," Joe Rappisi, Aegis program director in Moorestown, said in a conference call before the exercise. In earlier tests, Aegis simultaneously destroyed incoming ballistic- and cruise-missile targets.

Lockheed Martin Corp. said yesterday that its Moorestown unit had been awarded a $33 million contract to equip the Japanese destroyer Chokai with the Aegis Ballistic Missile Defense system. The Chokai will become the second of four destroyers in the Japanese Self Defense Force to get the Aegis capability developed at the sprawling Moorestown complex, where 5,500 of Lockheed Martin's more than 12,500 Philadelphia-area employees work. The first, the destroyer Kongo, is being outfitted now and is scheduled to participate in missile-defense tests later this year.

Retired Rear Adm. Wayne E. Meyer gave up on trying to prepare his speech for Sunday night because, he said, it was starting to sound too much like an obituary. The 80-year-old Meyer, widely hailed as the "Father of Aegis," the Navy's weapons system, was accorded yesterday an honor rarely bestowed upon the living: having a fighting ship named after him. Meyer managed the development of the system at what was then the RCA Advanced Technology Laboratories in Moorestown during the 1970s.