Northrop Grumman is the other big defense contractor that insists it’s a “space company,” though in practice it’s a Frankenstein stitched together from legacy aerospace brands. They swallowed Orbital ATK in 2018, so now they get to pretend they’re both a prime contractor and a nimble launcher operator, which is a bit like buying a craft brewery and claiming you’re redefining global beer.

Their crown jewel is still solid rockets. The same boosters that shoved the Space Shuttle off the pad now prop up SLS, ICBMs, and anything else that burns powdered aluminum and political capital. It’s not glamorous, but it pays, and nobody in Congress wants to vote against jobs in Utah. That’s why the Ground Based Strategic Deterrent (a.k.a. “Sentinel”) is their golden goose, an ICBM replacement program so massive and so protected that even its delays and cost overruns are basically shrugged off as patriotic necessities.

In space proper, Northrop inherited Orbital’s GEOStar bus, which was once a perfectly fine mid-size satellite platform until GEO comsat demand went the way of Blockbuster Video. Their commercial satellite play is effectively a retirement hobby now, but they found a clever way to stay relevant with Mission Extension Vehicles, space tugs that dock onto dying satellites to squeeze out a few more years of service. It’s one of the rare cases where Northrop managed something both technically sharp and commercially viable, though the market ceiling is low.

On the exploration side, they built the James Webb Space Telescope’s sunshield, which almost became more famous for slipping schedules than for blocking sunlight. They also crank out Cygnus cargo vehicles for the ISS, reliable workhorses, but let’s not kid ourselves, it’s a resupply truck, not a legacy-making flagship.

Where they’ve been trying to make noise lately is with the Space Development Agency. Northrop scored contracts for proliferated LEO missile warning and tracking satellites, which are supposed to give the Pentagon a cheap and resilient architecture. “Cheap” and “Northrop” don’t usually belong in the same sentence, but SDA has been moving at a pace that makes legacy primes nervous. If Northrop can deliver without their usual bureaucratic drag, it’ll be a minor miracle.

The irony of Northrop is that for all the “innovation” branding, their business model is older than dirt: make hardware the military absolutely cannot live without, overprice it, and then wrap it in the flag until nobody dares question it. When they dabble in the commercial or exploratory side, it’s usually a sideshow. The real Northrop Grumman is a missile house that happens to have a space division, not the other way around.