Christmas morning in French Guiana

On Christmas morning 2021, at 12:20 UTC, an Ariane 5 rose from Kourou in French Guiana carrying the most complex machine ever sent into space. Folded inside the fairing was a 6.5-metre mirror of 18 gold-coated beryllium segments and a sunshield the size of a tennis court, all of it assembled and tested at Northrop Grumman’s Space Park in Redondo Beach, California. The James Webb Space Telescope, with a lifetime cost of about 9.7 billion dollars, unfolded itself on the way to a point 1.5 million kilometres from Earth. Northrop Grumman was its prime contractor. Not bad for a company that most people associate with bombers.

The bidding war for Long Island

Northrop Grumman was born out of a fight. In 1994, with the Cold War over and defence budgets shrinking, Martin Marietta agreed to buy Grumman, the Long Island firm that had built the Hellcat, the Tomcat and the Apollo Lunar Module. Northrop, the Los Angeles company founded by Jack Northrop in 1939, came in over the top. It paid 2.1 billion dollars, outbidding Martin Marietta, and the flying-wing people bought the Moon-landing people. Grumman’s E-2 Hawkeye production line came with the deal, and the Hawkeye is still being built three decades later in its E-2D form.

Kresa’s shopping list

Kent Kresa, chief executive from 1990 to 2003, then went shopping. Vought’s aerostructures followed in 1994, Westinghouse’s defence electronics in 1996 for 3 billion dollars, Logicon in 1997, Ryan Aeronautical in 1999, Litton Industries and Newport News Shipbuilding in 2001, and TRW in 2002 for 7.8 billion dollars. In all he led some 15 acquisitions. One deal got away: a 1998 merger with Lockheed Martin was abandoned after resistance from the Pentagon and the Justice Department. For a decade Northrop Grumman was also America’s great builder of warships, until it spun the shipyards off as Huntington Ingalls Industries in March 2011. That same year it moved its headquarters from Los Angeles to Virginia.

Robots that cross oceans

Ryan brought something that would define the new century. The Global Hawk, first flown on 28 February 1998, was an unmanned jet built to stay aloft for more than a day. On 24 April 2001 one flew non-stop from Edwards Air Force Base to Australia in 22 hours, the first pilotless aircraft to cross the Pacific. The naval Triton followed in 2013. Then came the X-47B, a tailless robot that on 14 May 2013 became the first unmanned aircraft catapulted off a carrier, made the first unmanned arrested landing at sea that July, and in April 2015 refuelled itself in the air with no human hand on the controls.

Two wings, thirty years apart

Jack Northrop’s wing came back twice. The B-2 Spirit, designed by Northrop before the merger, first flew in July 1989; only 21 were built, at an average programme cost of 2.13 billion dollars each. On 22 June 2025 six of them dropped twelve 30,000-pound GBU-57 bombs on Iran’s Fordow enrichment plant. Its successor was won in October 2015, rolled out at Palmdale on 2 December 2022 and first flew on 10 November 2023: the B-21 Raider, named after the Doolittle Raiders and intended, the Air Force says, to number at least 100 aircraft. It has not all been triumph: in 2025 the company booked a 477 million dollar loss on the B-21’s first production lots.

Rockets, overruns and the bill

In 2018 Northrop Grumman paid 9.2 billion dollars for Orbital ATK, adding rockets, solid motors and the Cygnus cargo ship, which has flown more than 20 resupply missions to the International Space Station, each named after a figure from human spaceflight. With them came the Sentinel ICBM, a 13.3 billion dollar development contract from 2020 whose estimated cost rose by 81 per cent to 141 billion dollars, triggering a Nunn-McCurdy review in 2024. The company has paid for mistakes too, including a 325 million dollar settlement in 2009 over defective Navy aircraft. Under Kathy Warden, chief executive since 2019, it reported sales of 42 billion dollars in 2025 and a record backlog.

Továrny

• Palmdale (Plant 42) · Palmdale, California — B-2 and B-21 assembly; B-21 unveiled there in 2022
• Space Park · Redondo Beach, California — Former TRW site; James Webb Space Telescope assembled and tested
• Velitelství · West Falls Church, Virginia — Moved from Los Angeles in 2011

Lidé

• Kent Kresa · chief executive 1990–2003 — Led the Grumman purchase and some 15 acquisitions
• Ronald Sugar · chief executive 2003–2010
• Wes Bush · chief executive 2010–2018 — Oversaw the Huntington Ingalls spin-off, the Virginia move and Orbital ATK
• Kathy Warden · chief executive from 2019

Rekordy a prvenství

• First pilotless aircraft to cross the Pacific, Global Hawk, Edwards AFB to Australia, 24 April 2001; UAV absolute distance record of 13,219.86 km
• Global Hawk endurance flight of 33.1 hours, 22 March 2008
• First catapult launch of a UAV from an aircraft carrier, X-47B, USS George H.W. Bush, 14 May 2013
• First arrested landing of a UAV on a carrier at sea, X-47B, 10 July 2013
• First fully autonomous aerial refuelling, X-47B, April 2015
• Prime contractor of the James Webb Space Telescope, launched 25 December 2021