Northrop Grumman

Northrop Grumman is pioneering across every sector of space, helping government, civil and commercial customers tackle some of their biggest challenges.

Created: 2022-01-01

Updated: 2023-02-26

Company - Northrop Grumman

Founded
Country: 1994; USA

Website: Northrop Grumman

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Product/Service - Commercial Space Station

Classification: Space Stations & Habitats

Category: Commercial Space Station

Status: Development

First launch: Not announced

Space Station

NASA awarded $125.6 million to develop designs of space stations and other commercial destinations in space.

Northrop Grumman’s design for a modular, commercial destination in low-Earth orbit is built on decades of experience supporting NASA, defense, and commercial programs. The design leverages flight-proven elements, such as the Cygnus spacecraft that provides cargo delivery to the International Space Station, to provide a base module for extended capabilities including science, tourism, industrial experimentation, and the building of infrastructure beyond initial design.

Multiple docking ports will allow future expansion to support crew analog habitats, laboratories, crew airlocks, and facilities capable of artificial gravity, in support of multiple customers. This Space Act Agreement will enable Northrop Grumman to provide a detailed commercialization, operations, and capabilities plan, as well as space station requirements, mission success criteria, risk assessments, key technical and market analysis requirements, and preliminary design activities. Northrop Grumman’s team includes Dynetics, with other partners to be announced.

Gateway Crew Cabin

NASA Awards Northrop Grumman Artemis Contract for Gateway Crew Cabin.

Orbital Science Corporation of Dulles, Virginia, a wholly owned subsidiary of Northrop Grumman Space, has been awarded $187 million to design the habitation and logistics outpost (HALO) for the Gateway, which is part of NASA’s Artemis program and will help the agency build a sustainable presence at the Moon. This award funds HALO’s design through its preliminary design review, expected by the end of 2020.

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Product/Service - Space Solar Power Incremental Demonstrations and Research (SSPIDR)

Classification: Space Utilities

Category: Space Solar Power
Resources - Energy

Fields: Space Solar Power
Wireless Power Transfer

Status: Development

First launch: 2025

Space-Based Solar Power

Northrop Grumman has completed ground-based tests to demonstrate critical technology required for a 2025 demonstration of space-based solar power.

Northrop Grumman announced Dec 2022, the successful demonstration of a key element of SSPIDR, the ability to beam radio frequency energy toward various antennas by steering the beam. The testing was conducted in one of Northrop Grumman’s anechoic test chambers in Baltimore.

Next, Northrop Grumman will “take those findings and translate them into our prototype, which we anticipate launching in 2025 to actually show the capability of beaming RF energy down to the planet,” said Jay Patel, vice president of Northrop Grumman Remote Sensing Programs.

Created: 2023-01-15

Updated: 2023-02-26

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Product/Service - Space Junk Recycler

Classification: Space Resources

Category: ISRU (In Situ Resource Utilization)
In-Space Manufacturing

Fields: Material Recycling

Status: Development

First launch: Not announced

ISRU

Solar refinery to recycle space debris. the system would have the ability to vaporize small existing space debris; recycle and recover manufacturing materials from existing satellites; and even perform in-space manufacturing of structural elements for new satellites.

In its basic form, the recycler would include a large parabolic reflector, perhaps 50 to 100 feet in diameter; a spherical crucible made of material with an extremely high melting point; a set of compartments in which different types of salvaged materials could be stored; and several robotic arms for capturing “dead” satellites or other space debris.

The recycler’s reflector would concentrate solar energy into a small spherical space, creating an intense source of heat. The heat could be used either to simply vaporize existing small debris, or to heat larger pieces of space debris in the recycler’s crucible. The crucible could be rotated through the thermal flux like a rotisserie grill to heat the debris to a desired and uniform temperature. Using this approach, explains Eller, “we could selectively melt and capture material of type A, heat the crucible more to melt and capture material of type B and so on.” Materials melted and captured at each stage of the recycling process could be stored in separate compartments in the form of ingots, or perhaps piped in real time to another part of the recycler as source material for in-space 3-D printing manufacturing operations.

Any unneeded leftovers from the recycling process could be compressed into small pieces and vaporized by the solar concentrator. The ability to perform on-orbit recycling and manufacturing could also enable a new generation of simpler, lighter and potentially more capable satellite systems. Free from the impact of gravitational forces during launch, satellites could be assembled in space using simpler designs and materials with far less mass and structural strength.

As a result, they might look very different from traditional spacecraft buses, which are essentially boxes with one or more solar array appendages. “If we built a satellite in space, it could be a single panel of any desired length,” explains Eller. “One side could be an array of RF [radio frequency] elements and electronics, like a single large circuit board. You could produce additional panels to serve as solar arrays, or perhaps attach solar cells to the back of the original panel.”

Created: 2023-02-05

Updated: 2023-02-26

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Product/Service - Cygnus

Classification: Cargo Transportation & Landers

Category: Transport Service (Earth-LEO)

Status: Active

First launch: 2013

Partners: Thales Alenia

Cygnus

The Cygnus system is a flight proven design incorporating elements drawn from Northrop Grumman and its partners’ existing, flight-proven spacecraft technologies. Cygnus consists of a service module and a pressurized cargo module. The Cygnus spacecraft is used to carry crew supplies, spare equipment and scientific experiments to the space station.

The service module incorporates advanced avionics developed by Northrop Grumman and guidance and navigation components that allow for fully autonomous rendezvous with the space station. The avionics design fully meets all of the demanding NASA safety requirements imposed on human-rated vehicles. The pressurized cargo module is manufactured by Thales Alenia Space specifically for Cygnus.

Created: 2022-02-23

Updated: 2023-02-26

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