Northrop Grumman's Melbourne Campus — Melbourne, Florida

The Melbourne campus traces back to a radar airplane. According to the GlobalSecurity.org program history, Grumman Aerospace won the full scale development contract for the Joint STARS surveillance aircraft in September 1985, and during 1986 and 1987 the Grumman personnel working on that program relocated to a new plant in Melbourne, Florida. By March 22, 1996, when the Air Force accepted the first production E-8C there, Air Force reporting already called the plant Northrop Grumman's Melbourne, Fla., facility, the place where the radar, operations and control and communications subsystems of Joint STARS were installed and tested. That ceremony drew more than 1,500 members of the Joint STARS Joint Test Force, company staff and government officials to the Melbourne airport, and the program kept the plant busy into the 2000s.

By 2013 the site had a new title. A November 2013 company release carried by Aviation Pros refers to the Northrop Grumman Manned Aircraft Design Center of Excellence in Melbourne as the home of key personnel supporting the Joint STARS fleet. ClickOrlando reported in May 2014 that the company had announced the design center at Melbourne International Airport the previous year with 1,000 jobs for Brevard County, and that work began in the summer of 2013. Spectrum News 13 later described the 2013 decision as part of a plan to build six national centers of excellence, one of them in Melbourne.

Project Magellan was the code name for the largest expansion of the Melbourne campus. On May 8, 2014 the EDC of Florida's Space Coast announced that Northrop Grumman had selected Brevard County for an expansion that could add 1,800 jobs at full program capacity, at an average annual salary of $100,000, with about $500 million in new capital investment at Melbourne International Airport. The EDC set that wage against a Brevard County average wage of $44,159 at the time.

The plan came in two phases. Phase One was an approximately 220,000 square foot building and 300 jobs by the end of 2015. Phase Two, if the company met its business objectives, was an approximately 500,000 square foot facility and 1,500 more jobs. The EDC said the project had started more than a year earlier and accelerated in the fall of 2013, with the EDC coordinating the state, Enterprise Florida and Space Florida along with Brevard County, CareerSource Brevard, the City of Melbourne and the Melbourne Airport Authority. Melbourne Mayor Kathy Meehan and County Commission Chairman Mary Bolin Lewis spoke at the announcement, and Commissioner Andy Anderson noted the campus lay in County Commission District 5. According to ClickOrlando, Melbourne was in the running against San Antonio and other Florida communities.

The Melbourne expansion was approved with a mix of state cash and local tax relief. ClickOrlando reported that state legislators approved the incentives for Project Magellan in March 2014 and that the company would receive nearly $21 million in state incentives. Associated Press reporting carried by CBS Miami said the state agreed to give the contractor nearly $21 million in cash and that the company also received additional incentives including the waiver of local property taxes, and that legislators agreed to keep the details confidential while the project went by its code name.

The 2014 deal followed an earlier one. The same AP report noted that in 2013 Northrop Grumman had announced plans for more than 1,000 aerospace jobs at facilities in St. Augustine and Melbourne, with more than $10 million in state incentives pledged for that project. The EDC's own release projected that the Melbourne expansion would create 2,349 total jobs in Brevard County, counting indirect and induced positions, and a $293 million annual contribution to gross domestic product. Those figures were projections at the time of the May 2014 announcement, not counts of jobs later filled.

The campus became a design center for a new bomber. On November 9, 2015, Spectrum News 13 reported that the company celebrated its U.S. Air Force long-range strike bomber contract at its Melbourne facility, with Aerospace Systems president Tom Vice telling employees that the strategy had been to build the country's most innovative design center for manned military aircraft in Melbourne. The station reported 2,600 current Northrop Grumman jobs in Brevard County and 1,500 more on the way, at an average yearly wage of $100,000.

That aircraft is the B-21 Raider. FloridaCommerce's Powering Florida site states that Northrop Grumman engineers designed and developed the B-21 Raider at the company's growing campus off NASA Boulevard at Melbourne Orlando International Airport. Other programs are tied to the same buildings. The company's Melbourne careers page says the campus designs, develops and tests advanced manned aircraft and battle management systems, supporting C2ISR programs and the U.S. Navy E-2D Advanced Hawkeye, and describes the site as a facility for development and rapid prototyping of surveillance and battle management systems.

Northrop Grumman's careers page describes 17 buildings on a 109 acre campus adjacent to the Melbourne Orlando International Airport, with facilities for system design, development and integration. The airport authority's Land Development and Growth page lists Northrop Grumman first among the airport's notable tenants, ahead of L3Harris, Rockwell Collins, Embraer and Dassault Falcon Jet, and states that the airport campus has a daily population of more than 20,000 professionals.

The growth of the Northrop Grumman site in Melbourne can be read as a sequence of dated steps: Grumman's Joint STARS team arriving in 1986 and 1987, the design center announced in 2013, Project Magellan's approval and announcement in March and May 2014, and the bomber award event in November 2015. The airport land along NASA Boulevard that once hosted radar integration for a converted Boeing 707 now holds the buildings where the B-21 Raider was engineered, according to FloridaCommerce.

Public estimates of what the Melbourne campus means for Brevard County come from the 2014 and 2015 announcements. The EDC projected that the 1,800 Project Magellan jobs would produce a direct total net new wage impact of $180 million, and Spectrum News 13 cited an estimated $300 million impact to the Space Coast region when the bomber award was celebrated in Melbourne in November 2015. At that event Governor Rick Scott pointed to Florida's earlier elimination of the sales tax on machinery and equipment as an incentive for companies such as Northrop Grumman to buy equipment in the state. Current headcount for the Melbourne campus is not published on the company's careers page.