WASHINGTON — Anduril today unveiled its new Steelfin interceptor, whose leaderare aimed at costs a third of the price of the Patriot’s current PAC-3 Missile Segment Upgrade (MSE).
“One-way attack drones, ballistic missiles, cruise missiles, hypersonic weapons… our militaries and the militaries of our allies are saddled with a set of existing interceptors that are not scalable and are unable to cope with the volume of threat they face.ng,” Chris Brose, Anduril’s president and chief strategy officer, told reporters on a pre-announcement call.
Brose said the company had been “working on Steefin for a few years,” driven by the belief that the market would soon have a desire for cheaper interceptors.
The new interceptor is “modular,” Brose said, meaning it can fly with different rocket engines, different seekers and be launched from different platforms ranging from PAC-3, CAML and Typhoon systems to containerized munitions rounds. Brose said the system can be “reconfigured” to scale from defeating low-cost systems like Iran’s Shaheds to more sophisticated systems like ballistic cruise missiles and hypersonic weapons.
Steve Milano, the company’s senior director of missiles, said the company was in the running for the Army’s low-cost interceptor program with the Steelfin. Anduril was one of several vendors chosen to move forward with testing and demonstrations following the service’s recent xTech Apex Intercept competition – the event held by the Army to try to find as many effective but affordable interceptors as possible.
However, there may be a different competition in which Anduril also leads Steelfin. Friday, break down the defense first reported that Lockheed Martin and another undisclosed company had been selected for the Army’s Future Interceptor program.a previously unknown effort which seeks to find a next generation version of the current PAC-3 MSE.
Anduril executives declined to say whether the Steelfin had been selected for the Future Interceptor program. However, Steve Milano, the company’s senior director of missiles, said the Steelfin was “a natural fit in this area.”“As part of this competition,” Milano said: The Army is looking for a seven- to 10-inch terminal storage interceptor with a 10- to 13-inch booster to fit the existing Patriot launcher and the Common Autonomous Multi-Domain Launcher (CAML), and Steelfin “fits very well” those requirements.
As for production, Milano said he expects Anduril to reach full production for the Steelfin in late 2028 or early 2029. He said he suspects “at the low end” that the company will aim to produce “several thousand” of Steelfins per year, with a “high end” “near hundreds of thousands” per year, depending on the demand signal from the United States and customers abroad.
Milano said Anduril’s “intent” was to build most of the subassemblies for Steelfin at the company’s Arsenal-1 factory in Ohio and then do “final integration” of the interceptor with a “handful of our partners.” As for the solid-state rocket motors destined for Steelfin, Milano added that some will come from Anduril and others from other companies.
“We intentionally designed the Steelfin configuration with modular assembly, so that we could accommodate new suppliers as well as utilize our integrated and in-house rocket motor systems,” Milano explained.
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