Thales Gets $54M Contract for South Korean Navy

Thales Nederland has signed a contract for the delivery of five Goalkeeper systems to the Korean Navy. The total contract value is about $54 million. The systems are to be delivered within 28 months. Two Goalkeepers will be installed on the LPX (Landing Platform). This ship is scheduled to be launched in March 2005 and will be operational in June 2007. The other three Goalkeepers are destined for the three KDXII - Batch 2 destroyers, for which the contracts for the Combat Direction System, including sensors, were signed earlier this year. With this order, the total number of Goalkeepers supplied to the Korean Navy will be 14. Goalkeeper is Thales' answer to the need for close-in defense of ships against highly manoeuvrable missiles and aircraft. It is an autonomous and fully automatic system which detects and tracks its targets, opens fire and performs kill assessment for several targets simultaneously. Continuous search with track-while-scan provides an automatic and fast switch-over to the next-priority target in multiple-target scenarios, assuring the timely detection of small and supersonic targets, even in dense clutter and jamming environments.