Defense contractor and aerospace manufacturer Northrop Grumman opened a new hypersonic missile production site in Elkton, Maryland this week.
The facility will produce two types of ultrafast engines, ramjet and scramjets, which can power hypersonic missiles at speeds greater than five times the speed of sound. The engines are ideal given their lighter weight, yet are powered and precise, according to the company.
The site is also the first scramjet production factory in the U.S., said Chris Gettinger, director of advanced propulsion and systems at Northrop Grumman. Scramjet engines are known to be even faster than ramjets, given that combustion occurs at supersonic air velocity inside the engine.
“We don’t want to field just a handful of boutique weapons, we want to field affordable mass,” said Chris Haynes, Northrop Grumman’s senior director of strategy and business development. “And so the Hypersonic Capability Center is really that foundational key enabler that’s going to allow us to take hypersonics from the research and development phase that it’s lived in for the many years and transitioning it into a production environment.”
The facility is designed for end-to-end, large-scale manufacturing of Northrop Grumman’s air-breathing engines, which are powered by the atmosphere’s oxygen. The center will also consolidate all necessary development and production capabilities under one roof in a facility designed to efficiently and affordably handle current and future hypersonic programs, a Northrop Grumman spokesperson told Manufacturing Dive in an email.
“What we’re pressing toward is really a combination of some traditional manufacturing methods and new methods like additive manufacturing, really using the best of those two worlds and bringing them together to give the customer the most affordable system possible,” Gettinger said.
The defense contractor’s investment in the facility was in the “tens of millions of dollars” range, according to a Northrop Grumman spokesperson.
The company broke ground on its first hypersonics facility on the Elkton campus in 2021 and has already expanded the site. In December, the U.S. Air Force Research Laboratory’s Manufacturing and Industrial Technology Division awarded Northrop Grumman an $8.8 million contract to help the factory increase capacity as well as shorten production times on a cost-effective scale.
The newest hypersonic missile facility is an addition to Northrop Grumman’s Elkton campus that supports several Department of Defense programs with propulsion, fuzing and warhead development and production, a Northrop Grumman spokesperson told Manufacturing Dive.
It’ll also support the development and production of the U.S. Air Force’s hypersonic attack cruise missile. Northrop Grumman will produce ready missiles for the military branch in partnership with fellow defense contractor Raytheon Technologies. The Air Force awarded Raytheon Missiles and Defense a $985.4 million contract in September to develop and demonstrate scramjet-powered hypersonic attack cruise missile prototypes.
“We have moved beyond building and demonstrating propulsion prototypes to large-scale manufacturing,” Jim Kalberer, vice president of Northrop Grumman’s missile products, said in a statement of the opening. “Our proactive investment in this facility establishes the supply chain and optimizes manufacturing processes to produce hypersonic systems affordably at scale.”
Northrop Grumman is expanding its manufacturing footprint elsewhere in the U.S. Last month, the company announced it was building a 113,000-square-foot missile integration facility in West Virginia. Construction on the plant is expected to be completed next year and the facility will have the capacity to produce up to 600 strike missiles a year.