Lockheed Sea Ghost

The Lockheed Sea Ghost is a proposal to fulfill the United States Navy's requirement for a Unmanned Carrier-Launched Surveillance and Strike program.

Design
The Sea Ghost is a UCAV design for the U.S. Navy's Unmanned Carrier Launched Airborne Surveillance and Strike (UCLASS) program. It incorporates technologies from the F-35C Lightning II and RQ-170 Sentinel UAV, both other Lockheed designs. It has a bat-wing fuselage and emissions and bandwidth management for multi-spectral stealth. Lockheed claims it can reduce manpower requirements because a single operator could be able to operate multiple aircraft. Lockheed had a full-scale mock-up of the design to look at fit checks when the pre-solicitation was issued. The flying wing design was chosen because it was well suited for the missions intended for the aircraft, and the company had experience with it. It is aerodynamically efficient, allows for very low signatures, is structurally simplistic, and is easy to manufacture. The Sea Ghost will use sea spray optimized stealth materials developed for the F-35. The Sea Ghost has range and endurance, but does not have the weapons payload capability of a long-range strike platform, such as the A-6 Intruder. Making it carry large payloads at long ranges would affect affordability. It is made with open architecture avionics to have the ability to put new sensors or mission systems onboard over time. The Sea Ghost is made to operate autonomously, with the operator intervening if necessary.

The Lockheed Sea Ghost is competing against the Northrop Grumman X-47B, the General Atomics Sea Avenger, and the Boeing Phantom Ray in the program.

History
On 14 August 2013, Lockheed was awarded a $15 million contract to develop the airframe of their UCLASS entry. Contracts of the same amount were awarded to Boeing, General Atomics, and Northrop Grumman for their competing designs. A competition for a final airframe design is expected after January 2014.