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Let's play monopoly.
In the wake of Northrop-Orbital merger, Aerojet’s solid rocket engine business teetering on the brink.There are now technically two companies that still manufacture large solid rockets for military ICBMs — Aerojet Rocketdyne and Northrop Grumman Innovation Systems, which absorbed Orbital ATK in a deal that closed June 6. The industry is poised to become a monopoly, however, as Aerojet’s large solid rocket motor business is on not-so-solid ground. While both companies have healthy production lines for solid rockets for tactical missiles, unless Aerojet gets new orders, Northrop could end up as the Pentagon’s sole supplier of large solid rocket motors — generally defined as those greater than 1 meter in diameter. The Pentagon flagged this issue as a concern in its 2017 Annual Industrial Capabilities report to Congress. “In the very near future all the large SRMs for strategic missiles and space launch will be produced by Orbital ATK,” the report said. Among those large motors are the space shuttle-derived solid rocket boosters that will now be built under Northrop for NASA’s Space Launch System heavy-lift rocket. Aerojet has maintained a line producing strap-on boosters for United Launch Alliance Atlas 5 space launch vehicles and small development contracts from the Air Force Ground Based Strategic Deterrent (GBDS) program that is now in a competitive source selection between Northrop Grumman and Boeing. Posted by: 3dc 2018-06-28 |
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