Miles Jamison
The construction of Northrop Grumman‘s new Propulsion Innovation Center continues to progress.
Benefits of the Facility
The global aerospace and defense technology company said Monday that the 57,000-square-foot Elkton, Maryland, facility is intended to boost the production of solid rocket motors, or SRM. It will build on the company’s existing excess SRM capacity across its manufacturing facilities.
The Propulsion Innovation Center will house 250 engineers, tasked with developing advanced propulsion products intended for U.S. and allied defense programs. It is part of Northrop’s $100 million investment at its Elkton site, which involves the scale of production of the Department of Defense’s hypersonic air-breathing and SRM propulsion needs.
Ongoing modernization and smart infrastructure projects at the 550-acre Propulsion Systems & Controls site, including the new facility, are expected to boost onsite SRM design and manufacturing capacity by 25 percent. The new building will also provide 30 percent more jobs.
Remarks by Northrop’s Gordon LoPresti
“With engineering, development and production ramped up at the expanded campus, we’ll be able to scale operations to produce even more survivable, solid and air-breathing hypersonic propulsion solutions efficiently and affordably, at the pace the U.S. military needs them,” said Gordon LoPresti, senior director of propulsion systems and controls at Northrop Grumman.
