L3Harris image of missile warning and tracking satellite

NATIONAL HARBOR, Md. – An L3Harris Technologies [LHX[ executive here Wednesday said the company elected to not be a prime on the Space Force’s Space-Based Interceptor (SBI) prize competition because for now it wanted to instead focus on being a propulsion supplier for that element of missile defense. 

“We chose not to be a prime. We chose to be a merchant supplier, leveraging our equities that were proven in, which is propulsion, and I’ll leave it at that,” Rob Mitrevski, L3Harris president for Golden Dome Strategy and Integration, told reporters here during the annual Air Force Association’s Air, Space and Cyber Conference.

He added the company decided sitting out being an SBI prime “was the best thing for us to do.”

In April, the Space Force announced 12 companies won $3.2 billion in contracts for SBI prototypes via a prize competition (Defense Daily, April 24).

Last month, Gen. Michael Guetlein, direct reporting program manager of Golden Dome for America, told reporters all of the providers are progressing and seem to have passed the first of four gates, or tests, in the competition (Defense Daily, Aug. 12).

Gate one was getting a design in place and conducting component-level testing. Competitors must pass all four gates before Guetlein decides to even move forward with SBI as a system if he believes DoD can afford it and industry can supply systems in needed numbers.

Mitrevski said the company did not deny an interest but “we decided to leverage exactly where our strengths were. And I think that’s an area where it’s really important for the defense industrial base to understand how they can be the most helpful to the nation’s needs.”

He said sometimes an industry layer can be most helpful by moving up the value chain, like how L3Harris moved into a tier one prime contractor position for some elements missile defense including space-based sensing and interceptor propulsion. 

“So when we moved into Tier One Prime position in missile defense, we clearly thought we had a different way of thinking, a different innovation sort of approach, and we could clearly separate ourselves from the existing primes that were there at the time, we took a bet. We won. That bet has paid off in 70 space vehicles, where we had none in 2018 in this mission,” Mitrevski said.

However, he continued that in other areas L3Harris likes its market position.

In those areas, “we think we can help the most in that market position, and we’re going to maintain that position, like in the munitions area, where we clearly see ourselves as the preeminent supplier of propulsion systems. We’ve invested there. We continue to invest billions of dollars and dozens of buildings to drive capacity, scale, capability, where we think we are not only differentiated, but you can count on us,” Mitrevski said.

“So that was a decision that was made, I think, with a lot of clarity at the time of SBI.”