The US Defense Innovation Unit (DIU) is seeking commercially driven sensor and seeker technologies to sharpen the country’s defenses against ballistic and hypersonic missile threats.
The DIU has released a solicitation calling for advanced sensing systems to support interceptor engagements against intercontinental ballistic missiles and hypersonic glide vehicles.
This effort targets sensors capable of high-precision detection, tracking, and discrimination under extreme conditions, while staying within the tight size, weight, and power limits of interceptor and space platforms.
At the center of the announcement is a push to adapt commercial sensing and processing advances for military use. The DIU is looking for integrated solutions using LIDAR or LADAR, electro-optical and infrared sensors, radio frequency systems, or combinations of these technologies.
The goal is to generate fire-control-quality data, meaning information accurate and fast enough to guide kinetic interceptors during boost, midcourse, or glide phases of flight.
Proposed systems must support real-time tracking with low latency and high update rates, while also surviving harsh environments such as vibration, radiation, and thermal extremes.
Designs are expected to be modular, allowing use either as primary seekers on kinetic kill vehicles or as hosted payloads on satellites in low Earth orbit, with a design life of up to five years in space.
The Project’s Timeline
The DIU has laid out a tight development schedule. Selected teams are expected to demonstrate key performance metrics in a lab setting within six to nine months of award, followed by an on-orbit demonstration within 12 to 24 months.
Beyond technical performance, the solicitation emphasizes affordability and scalability, encouraging designs that can be manufactured at commercial volumes of more than 100 units per year and at costs significantly lower than legacy defense sensors.
The program will be executed through the DIU’s Commercial Solutions Opening process using prototype Other Transaction agreements.
Companies are advised that successful prototypes could lead directly to follow-on production contracts without additional competition, potentially expanding the scale of the effort across multiple Department of Defense users.
The solicitation is open to US and international vendors.
Upgrading US Missile Defense Sensing
The DIU’s latest call follows a series of recent US defense contracts aimed at modernizing missile defense sensing and tracking.
In 2023, the Missile Defense Agency contracted Raytheon to develop upgraded electro-optical and infrared seekers for the Next Generation Interceptor program, focusing on improving the discrimination between warheads and decoys during midcourse flight.
Northrop Grumman also moved forward with advanced space-based infrared sensing technologies under the Hypersonic and Ballistic Tracking Space Sensor program, part of the Space Development Agency’s effort to field a proliferated constellation for missile warning and tracking.
In 2025, Raytheon Technologies received a contract for $80 million to continue developing and qualifying advanced seeker processor hardware for the Maritime Strike Tomahawk program.
This work focuses on integrating and testing seeker technologies that improve targeting precision and reliability, ensuring that the missiles maintain high performance across multiple operational scenarios.
