Northrop Grumman broke ground this week on a sixth building at its Roy Innovation Center, expanding the northern Utah campus to more than 1.1 million square feet and adding hundreds of jobs to support the U.S. Air Force’s Sentinel intercontinental ballistic missile program.
The new Legacy Building breaks ground this summer and is scheduled for completion by 2028. Northrop Grumman directly employs over 11,000 Utahns and, according to a recent study, supports more than 46,000 jobs across the state, generating over $12.4 billion for the economy.
Sixth building in six years
Northrop Grumman’s Roy campus has grown fast. In late August of 2019, the Woodbury Corporation and Hunt Companies broke ground on the new 200,000 square foot Roy Innovation Center to serve as the future headquarters for Northrop Grumman’s nationwide team and support the national Ground Based Strategic Deterrent program.
About a year later, in September of 2020, Northrop Grumman and was awarded a $13.3 billion defense contract to build the Sentinel system as a replacement for the aging Minuteman III missile, with the work centered in Utah. That growth came with a $60 million tax incentive provided by the state, as a post-performance tax credit over 20 years. Six years and five buildings later, the campus now serves as headquarters for the Sentinel program’s engineering, digital design, supply chain and program management work.
“We as a company have about 5,200 employees working on the Sentinel program, and we’re continuing to grow as we’re maturing the design and as we’re getting ready to transition that design into the test program, which will start next year, and then into production so we can support deployment into the early 2030s,” says Ben Davies, corporate vice president and president of Northrop Grumman Defense Systems.
Growth comes as Sentinel’s price tag balloons
The expansion arrives as the Sentinel program itself faces sharp cost and schedule pressure nationally. On January 18, 2024, the U.S. Air Force notified Congress that the Sentinel program exceeded its baseline cost projections, resulting in a critical breach under the Nunn-McCurdy statute, with total program costs now estimated at $140.9 billion, up 81% from the previous estimate in September 2020.
The restructuring process is expected to delay the program by several years. The Pentagon has since recertified Sentinel as essential to national security, allowing the program — and the Utah campus that anchors much of its engineering work — to keep expanding even as costs are restructured.
Utah’s aerospace and defense sector has grown alongside that federal spending. Utah’s aerospace, defense, and security industry had a total economic output of nearly $100 billion in 2023, according to a report from EDCUtah and 47G, Utah’s aerospace and defense trade association.
“Aerospace and defense represents just under 20% of Utah’s GDP, and we are the fastest-growing aerospace and defense economy in the country,” says Kori Ann Edwards, chief strategy officer at 47G. “We have all four division sectors and over 11,000 employees at Northrop Grumman here in the state of Utah. They are a massive contributor to our ecosystem, and they are building our national security.”
Over the past five years, Northrop Grumman has invested $13.5 billion in infrastructure and R&D, including $2 billion dedicated to solid rocket motor capacity and capabilities tied to Sentinel and the broader strategic deterrence and space launch industrial base.
Gov. Spencer Cox attended the groundbreaking. The state’s ability to land repeat expansions from Utah’s largest defense employer, even as the broader Sentinel program undergoes federal restructuring, will remain a marker of Roy’s staying power as a hub for the Air Force’s next-generation ICBM work through the building’s 2028 completion and beyond.
This article was adapted from a press release by an automated tool and reviewed and edited by an editor for accuracy before publication.