United Launch Alliance<\/b> (ULA) placed an order for Northrop Grumman<\/b>\u2019s Graphite Epoxy Motor (GEM) motors worth more than $2 billion to support launches for Amazon\u2019s Project Kuiper constellation. <\/p>\n
The award, announced Wednesday, is for increased production of the 63-inch-diameter GEM 63 solid rocket booster and the extended length variation, GEM 63XL. The contract also includes a significant facility expansion to modernize current and new state-of-the-art facilities and tooling.<\/p>\n
GEM 63 solid rocket boosters have supported four ULA Atlas V launches, and the GEM 63XL booster is scheduled to support ULA\u2019s Vulcan Centaur rocket later this year in the extended length variation\u2019s first flight. <\/p>\n
Northrop Grumman CEO Kathy Warden previewed this award during the company\u2019s latest financial results, and said it was expected during the quarter. <\/p>\n
In April, Amazon awarded ULA, Arianespace, and Blue Origin contracts to provide a combined 83 launches for its Kuiper Low-Earth Orbit (LEO) constellation. This includes 38 launches on ULA\u2019s Vulcan rocket. ULA CEO Tory Bruno said at the time this would lead to increases in facilities and production capability at ULA and industry partners Beyond Gravity (formerly RUAG Space), Aerojet Rocketdyne, Blue Origin, and Northrop Grumman. <\/p>\n
\u201cWe are going to essentially be doubling America\u2019s launch industrial base,\u201d Bruno said in April. \u201cThis is a big impact for our country, and for our Western alliances to be able to keep up with this truly amazing constellation. We\u2019re pretty excited about what it means for the launch industry.\u201d <\/p>\n
ULA previously placed the largest-ever RL10 engine contract with \u200b\u200bAerojet Rocketdyne to support the missions.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
United Launch Alliance (ULA) placed an order for Northrop Grumman\u2019s Graphite Epoxy Motor (GEM) motors worth more than $2 billion to support launches for Amazon\u2019s Project Kuiper constellation. The award, announced Wednesday, is for increased production of the 63-inch-diameter GEM 63 solid rocket booster and the extended length variation, GEM 63XL. The contract also includes […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":55243,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-55242","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-news"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/55242"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=55242"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/55242\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/55243"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=55242"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=55242"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=55242"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}