ELKTON, Md. – Northrop Grumman has built a new Propulsion Innovation Center, a 57,000-square-foot facility in Elkton, Maryland, that will house 250 engineers working on advanced propulsion products. This new facility adds to the existing excess capacity for SRMs across the breadth of Northrop Grumman propulsion manufacturing sites.
The Propulsion Innovation Center is part of a broader $100 million investment by Northrop Grumman at the company’s Elkton site, increasing the company’s capacity to meet DoD hypersonic air-breathing and solid rocket motor propulsion needs.
Along with other new construction, modernization and smart infrastructure efforts already underway at the 550-acre Propulsion Systems & Controls location, the new building looks to increase onsite solid rocket motor (SRM) design and manufacturing capacity by 25% and support over 30% increased staffing.
Northrop Grumman provides end-to-end production, for SRMs and advanced propulsion hypersonic weapons including design, development and integration. Northrop Grumman’s overall production capacity for solid rocket propellant across six major sites totals about 30 million pounds per year today rising to nearly 50 million per year by 2028. Northrop Grumman’s 2024 SRM production rate of approximately 13,000 is slated to rise to over 25,000 in 2029.
“We’re delivering advanced propulsion and SRMs at scale, and Northrop Grumman has the capacity to do so today," Senior Director of Propulsion Systems and Controls Gordon LoPresti said. "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.”
