ASTRO America signs $9 million CRADA with Northrop Grumman to speed up munitions manufacturing
ASTRO America has signed a Cooperative Research and Development Agreement worth nearly $9 million with Northrop Grumman, Florida State University’s InSPIRE center, and the Air Force Research Laboratory’s Air Warfare Directorate, Mission Effects Division. The program is called DART, Design for Affordable and Rapid Throughput, and its stated job is to pull down the cost and qualification time of subsonic missile bodies and components.
The processes named in the agreement are additive solid-state deposition, novel casting, and powder bed fusion, applied alongside subtractive methods. That’s a narrower list than “additive manufacturing” as a catch-all, and none of the source material specifies which process handles which part of the missile body, or what the current baseline cost and lead time look like before DART touches them.
The test case is Gray Wolf, a subsonic missile system Northrop Grumman built with AFRL’s Munitions Directorate (now folded into the Air Warfare Directorate) specifically to minimize per-unit cost. Gray Wolf uses an open architecture meant to carry different payloads across multiple Air Force and Navy platforms, though neither release explains why Gray Wolf specifically was chosen as the DART test case over other munition systems. Whatever manufacturing approach survives contact with Gray Wolf’s qualification process is the one ASTRO says could transfer to other munition systems.
The work takes place in a new production lab near Eglin Air Force Base in Northwest Florida, with InSPIRE handling testing and evaluation, mechanical, thermal and aero testing of materials and subsystems, rather than production itself. InSPIRE’s involvement is tied to funding from Triumph Gulf Coast, a regional economic development vehicle. Both executives quoted in the releases frame the agreement as much in terms of Northwest Florida’s industrial base as the munitions program itself.
What’s missing from both releases is any figure on current Gray Wolf unit cost, any qualification timeline baseline, or a date for when DART is supposed to produce a first article. ASTRO says more detail on scope and milestones is coming as the collaboration advances, which in practice means there’s nothing to verify yet beyond the dollar figure and the partner list.