Northrop Grumman Expands Role on DARPA’s Burn n’ Go Rocket Motor Effort

Northrop Grumman is deepening its role in a Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency effort to rethink how solid rocket motors are designed and produced. In an award announcement, Raytheon (an RTX business) said it and Northrop Grumman have advanced the DARPA Burn n’ Go program into phase two, with the work aimed at a new solid rocket motor design that can be tuned across missions rather than treated as a single-use propulsion option.

DARPA’s Burn n’ Go program is focused on tailorable, post-manufacturing thrust control for solid rocket motor (SRM) technology. The agency said the objective is to improve performance and manufacturing efficiency by using materials-science approaches that control burn surface area after production, streamline quality control for ignition systems and propellant casting, and incorporate real-time health monitoring of the SRM. The endpoint, DARPA says, is a robust technology that can be tailored to a specific thrust profile after manufacturing and potentially used across multiple weapon systems to enable more flexible procurement and large-scale stockpiling.

Raytheon’s phase two award follows what the company described as a seven-month, accelerated phase one effort. In that earlier effort, Raytheon and Northrop Grumman demonstrated the feasibility of a “composable” propulsion approach, with the intent of decoupling motors from traditional single-use designs.

Under the phase two contract, Raytheon said its Advanced Technology team will further mature and scale the solution and then run a series of demonstrations intended to show how the design performs in increasingly realistic rocket motor configurations. Raytheon also said it is partnering with Northrop Grumman’s Allegany Ballistics Laboratory (ABL), which it described as having expertise in solid rocket motor design and manufacturing, and that Luna Innovations is contributing material development capabilities aligned with DARPA’s thrust-control vision.

For Northrop Grumman, the program builds on an industrial base it already positions as central to U.S. solid rocket motor production. In a company overview of ABL, Northrop Grumman said the West Virginia facility is a Navy-owned site operated on long-term lease for developing and manufacturing rocket motors and warheads for nearly every tactical missile program fielded by the U.S. military, and that ABL produces a major share of the nation’s tactical rocket motors.

Northrop Grumman has also emphasized capacity expansion for SRMs more broadly, including investments in manufacturing modernization and digital engineering. In a separate company “boosting production” overview, Northrop Grumman said it has invested more than $1 billion over the last seven years in facility expansion and modernization, and it projected readiness to double SRM production capacity by 2027. While those capacity plans are not described as being specific to Burn n’ Go, they provide context for why DARPA’s manufacturing efficiency goal could matter to missile industrial planning.

Several details remain undisclosed in the public materials released around the phase two decision. Neither Raytheon nor DARPA, in the statements accessible from the award announcement and program page, provided a contract value, specific milestones and test dates, or quantified performance targets for the thrust-control capability. The division of work between Raytheon and Northrop Grumman beyond ABL’s role also was not broken out in detail in the materials reviewed.

What to watch next is whether the phase two demonstrations validate that the motor architecture can achieve tailorable thrust control after manufacturing, and whether the approach can be scaled in ways that reduce production bottlenecks. DARPA’s framing suggests the technology is intended to support more flexible weapons procurement and larger-scale production/stockpiling, so follow-on awards, additional test outcomes, and any indications of translation into production programs will likely be the next indicates for the market.