A non-Sentinel flight test for the W87-1 warhead is planned for next calendar year, a spokesperson for Sandia National Laboratories told the Exchange Monitor in an email this week.

“Even with the disruption with the Sentinel program, we've been able to continue to keep that program on track,” Laura McGill, director of Sandia, said Monday in response to a question by the Monitor in a virtual press conference. “We've actually been able to modify the way we do our development in partnership with the other design agency, which is Livermore National Labs on this. We've actually come up with some ways to streamline that program and to integrate our systems verification program so that we can actually reduce the schedule.”

McGill added the lab also determined that “we could do our first flight test very late in that program and still hold to the current schedule.”

In January, John Evans, principal assistant deputy administrator for stockpile management at the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA), told the Monitor that within the next year “one, perhaps both” of the W87 warheads — the W87-0 which is already in the stockpile and would fly first on the Sentinel intercontinental ballistic missile, and the W87-1 that would fly next on the missile — would do a test flight on a non-Sentinel missile.

Sentinel, being built by Northrop Grumman, will eventually replace the Boeing-made Minuteman III as the Air Force’s silo-based, nuclear-armed intercontinental ballistic missile sometime in the 2030s while the Minuteman III is still commissioned.

Evans told the Monitor that while a non-Sentinel test would not be the “exact warhead configuration,” the agency can fly the warhead on a test article of the arrowshell the missile would use.

Evans said that the agency is “proceeding as if there is no delay in the Sentinel program.”

“Regardless of the missile schedule, most of the components are agnostic to when the missile is developed, and so we are using enhanced modeling and simulation where we can to understand as best we can the missile environment, and so that we can proceed at our normal pace with relatively moderate risk,” Evans said.