Northrop Grumman

Short answer: Northrop Grumman is a US aerospace and defense company based in Falls Church, Virginia. Its 2025 annual report (Form 10-K) says the company began in 1939 in Hawthorne, California, as Northrop Aircraft Incorporated, founded by Jack Northrop.

Northrop Corporation was a principal developer of flying-wing designs, which, according to the company's heritage page, led to the B-2 stealth bomber. In 1994 it acquired the Grumman Corporation, which built the Apollo Lunar Module, and the combined company was renamed Northrop Grumman. The heritage page lists more than 20 companies it has since absorbed, including Westinghouse's defense electronics business (1996), Litton (2001), TRW (2002), Scaled Composites (2007) and Orbital ATK (2018). The 10-K reports 2025 sales of $41.954 billion, about 84% of them to the US government, and about 95,000 employees. It lists the B-21 Raider long-range strike bomber for the US Air Force and support for the B-2 Spirit among its key programs. For NASA's James Webb Space Telescope, launched on December 25, 2021, Northrop Grumman was the prime contractor. It designed and built the deployable sunshield, provided the spacecraft and integrated the whole observatory. NASA describes the sunshield as five layers of Kapton coated with reflective metal, each thinner than a human hair, about the size of a tennis court. The Reel uses company footage, including a hangar with aircraft, a holographic globe, an underwater drone, a cleanroom and a satellite.

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