Inside the ‘space factory’

Powerful air filters kick on every 27 seconds, pulling particles of dust from the air with a steady hum. Workers wear head-to-toe “clean room” suits so nothing on their body contaminates the environment – not even an errant strand of hair.

The measures taken every day at Raytheon’s Space Systems Operations facility in Tucson, Arizona, make sense when you consider the magnitude of the work that happens there. Inside the 49,000 square-foot facility, a team of technicians, engineers and operators develop, test and assemble parts for highly precise defensive weapons known as “kill vehicles” that track and defeat ballistic missiles in the vacuum of space – an environment the site was designed specifically to recreate.

“Years of rigorous engineering, rigorous cleanliness and rigorous testing ensures our defenses will work reliably when faced with a real threat,” said Justin Jenia, vice president of Strike Initiatives at Raytheon, an RTX business.

“We have 25 years of iterative experience and data from 50 successful space intercepts,” Jenia added. “What we learned, what we saw in these increasingly complex test scenarios has led to significant efficiencies and process improvements in our factory assembly and environmental controls.”

Why so clean?

Keeping an exceptionally sterile environment is important when working with precision optics and sensors. And it’s even more important when those optics and sensors are going into such a high-stakes situation.

“Any tiny particulate on the lens will look like a target-like object and affect the probability of intercepting the actual target,” Jenia said. “Keeping the vehicle impeccably clean throughout assembly, testing and shipping to the ground-based launcher is hypercritical.”

Stainless steel is the metal of choice in the space factory for particle mitigation, while sensors throughout the building constantly measure air pressure, temperature, humidity and microscopic particles.

The facility is the birthplace of the EKV, which marked its 13th intercept during a test in December 2023 run by the U.S. Missile Defense Agency and U.S. Northern Command. The weapon slammed into and destroyed its target, a mock intermediate-range ballistic missile, over the Pacific Ocean.

Dedicated to the mission

Jenia, who joined Raytheon more than 20 years ago as the business and the U.S. Missile Defense Agency were ramping up their mission, has seen the systems now being tested and deployed in their earliest stages.

“As a young engineering intern turned full-time employee, it was quite an adrenaline rush to apply what I learned in school to real-world situations,” Jenia said. “It was about this exciting, exquisite, high-end, high-tech engineering when I was young.”

He recalled a pivotal career moment when the government-industry team achieved their first intercept in 1999.

As he recalls it, after all the high-fives and cheers, a member of the military delegation stood up and said, “Congratulations, we just demonstrated something that someday potentially will save Los Angeles or Washington, D.C.”

“It’s a memory I’ll never forget. I was already on this high that our engineering and our team’s efforts came to fruition,” Jenia said. “It really drove so much passion and excitement into me so early in my career.”

All views are those of Raytheon and do not imply endorsement by the Missile Defense Agency.