Joint STARS and Melbourne — Melbourne, Florida

Joint STARS reached Melbourne in the mid 1980s. The GlobalSecurity.org program history traces the system to 1982, when the Pentagon merged the Army's SOTAS helicopter radar effort and the Air Force's Pave Mover program into one joint project. In May 1984 the Air Force and Army chiefs settled on a Boeing 707 as the platform, and in September 1985 the full scale development contract went to Grumman Aerospace, with the radar subcontracted to Norden Systems. During 1986 and 1987, as design reviews ran, the Grumman staff assigned to Joint STARS relocated to a new plant in Melbourne, Florida, beside the city's airport.

The Melbourne team's first aircraft flew within two years of the move. According to the same history, Grumman assembled an E-8A prototype on a rebuilt 707 and completed a test flight without the radar in April 1988, and the first full test flight using the Norden radar followed in December 1988. That year the Defense Acquisition Board raised the planned fleet from 10 to 22 aircraft, a number the Pentagon later cut more than once.

Melbourne was where an airliner became a surveillance aircraft. An Air Force Electronic Systems Center release from March 1996 explains that used Boeing 707-300 aircraft were remanufactured by Northrop Grumman at Lake Charles, Louisiana, before being flown to Melbourne for installation of the electronics. The same release calls the Melbourne facility the place where the heart of Joint STARS, the radar, operations and control and communications subsystems, was installed and tested.

The GlobalSecurity.org production page adds detail. Norden Systems of Norwalk, Connecticut built the radar sensor; the 24-foot Joint STARS radar and the computer systems were installed at the company's AGS and BM Systems facility in Melbourne, and the Melbourne team completed each production aircraft with ground and flight testing. The Air Force fact sheet describes the result: a 27-foot canoe-shaped radome under the forward fuselage housing a 24-foot side-looking phased array antenna, with a crew of four on the flight deck and normally 15 Air Force and three Army specialists in the mission crew.

The program's milestone ceremony took place in Melbourne on March 22, 1996. Under Secretary of the Air Force Rudy deLeon and Joint STARS Program Director Col. Robert Chedister accepted the first production E-8C at Northrop Grumman's Melbourne facility, before an audience of more than 1,500 members of the Joint STARS Joint Test Force, company and subcontractor staff and government officials. Shortly after the ceremony the aircraft flew from Melbourne to Robins Air Force Base in Georgia for depot work before transfer to Air Combat Command.

By then the system had already been used in two deployments. The Air Force fact sheet states that the first two developmental aircraft deployed in 1991 to Operation Desert Storm and supported Operation Joint Endeavor in Bosnia starting in December 1995. The 1996 release reported plans for 20 production aircraft, 19 of them assigned to the 93rd Air Control Wing at Robins, and noted that the E-8C test plane would remain at Melbourne while staying available for deployments. The Air Force fact sheet gives December 1997 as the date of initial operating capability.

Planned numbers shifted throughout the 1990s, from 20 production aircraft in 1990 to 19 approved for full-rate production in September 1996 and 13 after the May 1997 Quadrennial Defense Review, according to GlobalSecurity.org. Congress later funded more. On August 6, 2001 the company delivered the first Block 20 E-8C, the 11th production aircraft, more than three weeks early. The 13th followed in April 2002, and aircraft P-14 was delivered in August 2002. Weeks later, on October 1, 2002, the Air Force fact sheet records that the 93rd Air Control Wing and a Georgia Air National Guard wing were deactivated and the blended 116th Air Control Wing took over the whole fleet that Melbourne had equipped.

The last airplane through Melbourne was funded in 2003. A May 2003 company release posted by GlobalSecurity.org reported a final $113 million increment of a $257 million contract for the 17th E-8C, and restated that the Joint STARS radar and computer systems were installed in Melbourne before ground and flight testing and delivery to Robins. GlobalSecurity.org records that the 17th and final E-8C was delivered on March 23, 2005, closing two decades of production work that began with the Grumman move to Melbourne in 1986 and 1987.

Support work continued in Melbourne after the last delivery. GlobalSecurity.org describes the Melbourne team supporting the 93rd Air Control Wing and the Warner Robins Air Logistics Center under a Total System Support Responsibility contract, a partnership meant to keep the E-8C fleet available. Northrop Grumman's sustainment contract was first awarded in 2000. A November 7, 2013 release datelined Melbourne announced a $178 million award to continue that work, supported by key personnel at the Northrop Grumman Manned Aircraft Design Center of Excellence in Melbourne, the Lake Charles maintenance center and more than 30 suppliers.

A year later, on November 14, 2014, the company announced a further $210 million sustainment contract, again datelined Melbourne. It described logistics, engineering, training, mission support, supply chain and depot maintenance for the fleet at Robins and stated that the company had partnered with the Air Force on Joint STARS for nearly 30 years, a span that matches the 1985 Grumman contract and the Melbourne plant that followed.

The aircraft whose electronics were installed in Melbourne flew for more than three decades. Defense News reported that the E-8C flew its last operational mission on September 21, 2023, from Desert Storm to missions near Ukraine, and that the fleet held 16 operational jets when retirement began. Air & Space Forces Magazine reported that the final E-8C left Robins Air Force Base on November 15, 2023, after some 14,000 operational sorties and more than 141,000 flying hours since 1991. The Melbourne buildings that installed and tested Joint STARS radars from 1986 onward remain part of Northrop Grumman's campus at the Melbourne Orlando International Airport.

The end had been planned for several years. Air & Space Forces Magazine reported that Air Force leaders announced in June 2021 their intent to cut the aircraft from Robins, which had hosted the E-8s since 1996, the same year the first production jet was accepted in Melbourne. Defense News noted that the fleet had withdrawn from U.S. Central Command in 2019 after an 18-year deployment. For Melbourne, the 2023 retirement closed a program that had brought Grumman to the city 37 years earlier.