Pentagon Awards $199M Contract to Johns Hopkins for Sentinel ICBM Program Support
The U.S. Air Force has awarded Johns Hopkins University's Applied Physics Laboratory a $199 million contract to provide research and development engineering support for the Sentinel LGM-35A intercontinental ballistic missile program, which aims to replace the aging Minuteman III fleet. The sole-source contract, managed by the Air Force Nuclear Weapons Center at Hill Air Force Base, runs through July 2029. Sentinel has faced intense scrutiny after its projected cost ballooned from $77.7 billion to over $140 billion, triggering a Nunn-McCurdy breach. Most cost growth is attributed to extensive ground infrastructure modernization across 450 missile silos in five states, requiring over 7,500 miles of new cabling. The program's first flight test has been delayed from 2026 to March 2028. Johns Hopkins APL, as a University Affiliated Research Center, will provide independent technical analysis to help mitigate risks and prevent further cost overruns.
Editorial responsibility
- No named human review is recorded for this page.
- Reports are grouped by semantic similarity and deterministic rules. Language models may assist titles, summaries, translation and cross-source analysis; the page itself is projected from evidence records.
- Current automated evidence projection