Long Wall announces Cyclops: the mass-producible interceptor

Long Wall has announced Cyclops: a new, surface-launched, exoatmospheric interceptor to defeat missiles in the midcourse phase of flight. Cyclops will provide high-performance, low-cost magazine depth for homeland and regional missile defense.

A mission to defer and defeat
As Long Wall’s flagship interceptor, Cyclops underpins our mission to accelerate missile defense. Cyclops is born of the solemn recognition that ballistic missiles remain among the greatest threats to our stability and peace.

These missiles are no longer just hypothetical threats – they are actively used in attacks in numbers never seen before. Such attacks have revealed a fundamental asymmetry: raid sizes have climbed into the hundreds, eclipsing in a single day our annual production capacity for entire types of interceptors. And so again, just days later.

Proliferation continues to new actors, and there’s a good reason why. Ballistic missiles provide leverage and capacity to hold what is dear to us at risk, at a dramatically lower cost than it takes to defend against them. When missile defense fails, it threatens our resolve.

The only credible answer is a new interceptor that is built to be mass produced from day one. We must build and field them as fast as we can.

Mass-producible midcourse interceptors
The problem of kinetic intercept gets harder for advanced missile threats, which travel at extreme speeds, deploy countermeasures, and spend much of their midcourse phase of flight outside of Earth’s atmosphere.

Those challenges have made midcourse interceptors complex. Legacy systems are limited: unit costs remain too high, magazine depth too low, and prospects of improving either issue – by reducing cost or by scaling production – unlikely in the confines of how development has proceeded.

We need a new approach.

Cyclops is the first interceptor developed from a clean sheet for mass production. It takes full advantage of 21st century advances in autonomy, compute, optics, and propulsion – breakthroughs that have been stress-tested in industries where production rates are orders of magnitude higher than in missile defense.

Built to scale, Cyclops changes the game for the most advanced threats we face.

Modern kill vehicles
At the top of the Cyclops stack sits an exoatmospheric kill vehicle, which neutralizes threats via a hit-to-kill impact, rather than blast fragmentation. Many of the hard technology problems in midcourse defense are in the EKV. Solving those problems gives us our greatest opportunities to improve cost and producibility.

Specifically, an EKV’s propulsion and seeker are prime examples of subsystems that can make or break mass production. Certain choices land you with a few possible vendors on the continent. Others can be built at scale.

This year, we’ve been obsessively focused here. We’ve built our first prototype and commenced testing. Now, we are confident Cyclops can be manufactured in the hundreds or thousands – not dozens – to achieve magazine depth for missile defense.

Distributed and layered defense
When we succeed in fielding a mass-produced interceptor, where will it go? The geographic basing of interceptors isn’t a static problem. It depends on what you’re defending and what you’re defending against. Because existing interceptors are so expensive, they’re limited in their quantity and, by extension, where they can be based.

Our goal is to reduce limitations on where Cyclops can be fielded across the surface of the Earth – on land or at sea – so that commanders can employ this system with as much flexibility as the mission demands.

To make this possible, we’ve designed a containerized launching station for Cyclops. Our CLS will launch Cyclops from sites without much support, whether deployed to bare ground or the deck of a ship. It’s cheap enough that it can be functionally expendable, and packed into a shipping container that can be picked up, dropped off, or left alone in any number of locations.

We built a first CLS test unit this year, and we’re executing a self-funded development campaign that uses 6x THAAD simulators.

Tested faster & cheaper
We must field Cyclops on an operationally relevant timeline. When we think about this challenge, test – especially flight test – is top of mind.

The traditional approach to testing has contributed substantially to the overall development cost of interceptors. But we have a unique opportunity.

With our in-house liquid booster vehicle, RSX, test flight and targets become cheap, highly available, routine, and easy to move across the globe. RSX will accelerate Cyclops development, just as it serves hypersonic flight test and missile defense target missions.

Production ready
Long Wall is modifying existing production lines for the development and initial production of Cyclops. Fully utilized, our existing 160,000+ square feet of facilities can produce over one hundred Cyclops rounds per year.

We bring 3D printing, CNC machining, welding, electronics assembly, environmental testing, hotfire testing, and vehicle integration in an ordnance-safe environment together under one roof to accelerate the process from development through production.

Our manufacturing approach is modular, using commercial machinery wherever we can. This way, we can scale rapidly to meet surges in demand.

Onward
Long-range missile attacks are a growing menace around the world, and the need for new defenses is urgent. Cyclops is how we restore deterrence and scale missile defense for the world we live in today.