L3Harris Technologies [LHX] completed a $125 million expansion at its payload manufacturing facility in Fort Wayne, Indiana, to support its work for the Space Development Agency (SDA) and the “Golden Dome” missile defense initiative. The facility will have capacity to produce 48 payloads per year when it is fully ramped up.
L3Harris has built payloads in the Fort Wayne facility since the 1960s. The facility focuses on infrared sensor payloads that serve national defense and civil weather, including the imager for NOAA’s GeoXO satellite system. The company’s heritage in weather payloads informed its missile defense capabilities, which is one of the few other missions that relies on real-time data from infrared sensors.
This expansion is part of a move toward productionizing space payloads instead of treating them as one-off, bespoke missions, Rob Mitrevski, vice president and general manager of Spectral Solutions at L3Harris Technologies, told sister publication
Via Satellite last week during Space Symposium.
“It’s very important to create that scale necessary, the producibility, the predictability, and the schedule confidence at rate that’s required,” he said.
Mitrevski said L3Harris is scaling up in missile warning and missile defense with investments in facilities, workforce, and supply chain. He said it was a “calculated risk” for the company to make this investment in increasing production.
“We knew the Golden Dome, or some variant of that need, would come,” Mitrevski said. “If you pay attention to the threats and pay attention to our near peer adversaries and the progress they’re making, their evolution, you can extrapolate how things are going to go. We knew the U.S. would respond as a nation, I think we’ve seen that buyer signal strengthen over the years.”
Mitrevski cites the $2.5 billion in backlog L3Harris has won in missile defense, although this is a new area of business for the company in recent years. L3Harris has five satellites on orbit and 34 satellites in development for the Space Development Agency’s Tracking Layer and the Missile Defense Agency’s Hypersonic and Ballistic Tracking Space Sensor (HBTSS) program.
This investment in production comes as the U.S. is imposing tariffs on all countries and much higher tariffs on China. Mitrevski said that the company’s supply chain is primarily based in the U.S., and the company is assessing the full impact of tariffs.
The full impact is “unknown,” at this point, he said. “In our business a domestic supply chain is vitally important. There’s potential that the raw materials aspect will create some impact but we really don’t know yet. It’s still early in the process. We’re all talking about it, but there’s been no effect as of yet that we’ve seen.”
This story was first published by Via Satellite