Mike Laidley: Northrop’s OmegA Rocket Booster Work Could Benefit NASA’s SLS

A Northrop Grumman official told NASASpaceflight in an interview published Monday the company sees “a lot of synergies” between the Common Booster Segments for the OmegA rocket and the solid rocket boosters for NASA’s Space Launch System.

“And there’s a lot of benefit to NASA from a cost perspective on SLS if OmegA goes forward, opens up the CBS production line, and ultimately continues to develop the CBS segments which could have a lot of cross utilization and technologies and manufacturing tooling and things like that between the two,” said Mike Laidley, vice president of space launch program at Northrop’s innovation systems business.

Laidley discussed how the company’s manufacturing process and segmented case design for OmegA rocket’s CBS boosters could benefit the SLS program.

Northrop designed the CBS boosters at its Chandler, Ariz.-based facility and has started to build the segments at its test site in Promontory, Utah.

The company plans to conduct a static-fire test of its C600 booster for OmegA’s intermediate variant in April 2019 and another firing test in August 2019 for the rocket’s C300 second-stage booster, according to the report.

Northrop received in October a potential $791.6M other transaction agreement from the U.S. Air Force to develop OmegA under the Evolved Expendable Launch Vehicle program.