Northrop Grumman

Northrop Grumman Corporation
Type	Public
Traded as	NYSE: NOC; S&P 500 component
Industry	Aerospace and defence; Information technology
Founded	1994, by the merger of Northrop Corporation (1939) and Grumman Aerospace (1929)
Founder	Jack Northrop (Northrop); Leroy Grumman (Grumman)
Headquarters	Falls Church, Virginia, United States
Key people	Kathy Warden (Chair, president and chief executive officer)
Products	Military aircraft, uncrewed systems, space systems, missile defence, sensors, cyber and mission systems
Employees	Approximately 97,000
Website	northropgrumman.com

Northrop Grumman Corporation is an American aerospace and defence company headquartered in Falls Church, Virginia. It is among the largest defence contractors in the world by revenue and is the prime contractor for several of the most consequential programmes in the United States arsenal, including the B-2 Spirit and its successor the B-21 Raider, the Sentinel intercontinental ballistic missile, and a very large share of American military space and sensor systems.

The company was created in 1994 when Northrop Corporation, founded by Jack Northrop in 1939, bought Grumman Aerospace, founded by Leroy Grumman in 1929. Both were among the defining aircraft builders of the twentieth century: Northrop for the flying wing and for stealth, Grumman for naval aviation and for the Apollo Lunar Module.

Northrop Grumman is organised into four sectors: Aeronautics Systems, Defense Systems, Mission Systems and Space Systems. It employs approximately 97,000 people and derives the great majority of its revenue from the United States government, principally the Department of Defense and the intelligence community, a concentration that makes it acutely exposed to appropriations decisions and largely insulated from ordinary commercial competition.

The company has been the subject of repeated litigation and investigation over contract fraud, defective products, environmental contamination at legacy sites, and export control violations, and its supply of weapons used in the Gaza war has made it a target of divestment campaigns.

History

Northrop before the merger

Jack Northrop was among the most inventive American aircraft designers and among the least commercially successful. He worked for Donald Douglas and for Lockheed, where he contributed to the Vega, founded and lost two earlier companies, and established Northrop Corporation at Hawthorne, California, in 1939.

His preoccupation was the flying wing, an aircraft with no fuselage and no tail, which offers very low drag and, as it turned out half a century later, a very small radar signature. He built the N-1M, the N-9M, the XB-35 and, with jet engines, the YB-49. The YB-49 was cancelled in 1949 in circumstances Northrop believed to be improper, and he maintained for the rest of his life that the programme had been killed because he refused to merge his company with Convair at the insistence of the Secretary of the Air Force, Stuart Symington. The existing airframes were ordered destroyed.

The company survived on other work: the F-89 Scorpion interceptor, the T-38 Talon trainer, which remains in service, and the F-5 Freedom Fighter, an inexpensive lightweight fighter exported very widely and among the most commercially successful American combat aircraft ever built. It lost the Lightweight Fighter competition of the 1970s with the YF-17 to General Dynamics' YF-16, though the YF-17 was subsequently developed with McDonnell Douglas into the F/A-18 Hornet, on which Northrop was the junior partner and which led to protracted litigation between the two.

The vindication came in secret. Northrop won the Advanced Technology Bomber contract in 1981, and the result, revealed in 1988, was the B-2 Spirit: a flying wing, exactly the configuration Jack Northrop had pursued for forty years. He was shown a model of it in 1980, shortly before his death and while confined to a wheelchair and unable to speak, having been granted special clearance for the purpose. He wrote that he now knew why God had kept him alive for the last twenty-five years.

The B-2 programme was extremely expensive. A planned buy of 132 aircraft was reduced to 21 after the Cold War ended, which pushed the programme cost per aircraft above US$2 billion and made it a standing example in debates about procurement.

Grumman before the merger

Grumman Aircraft Engineering Corporation was founded on Long Island in 1929 by Leroy Grumman, Jake Swirbul and William Schwendler, and built its reputation on carrier aircraft of exceptional structural robustness, which earned it the informal name of the Grumman Iron Works.

Its wartime aircraft, the F4F Wildcat, the F6F Hellcat and the TBF Avenger, were central to the naval war in the Pacific; the Hellcat alone is credited with a very large share of American aerial victories against Japan. Post-war it produced the F9F Panther, the A-6 Intruder, the E-2 Hawkeye, still in production in updated form, the EA-6B Prowler and the F-14 Tomcat, the variable-geometry fleet defence fighter that served from 1974 to 2006 and that is the aircraft most associated with the company in public memory.

Grumman also built the Apollo Lunar Module, the only crewed vehicle ever to land on another body, which is generally regarded as the company's finest engineering achievement and which was delivered without a single failure across six landings and one emergency return.

The end of the Cold War reduced naval aircraft procurement sharply, the F-14 line closed, and Grumman's attempts to diversify into bus manufacture, postal vehicles and information technology were not sufficient. In 1994 it was the subject of a bidding contest between Martin Marietta and Northrop, which Northrop won at approximately US$2.1 billion.

Consolidation, 1994 to 2002

The merger took place during the period of American defence consolidation that followed the end of the Cold War, when the Pentagon told contractors at a 1993 dinner, remembered as the Last Supper, that there was work for perhaps half of them and that they should merge or exit.

Northrop Grumman was among the most acquisitive participants. It bought Vought Aircraft in 1994, Westinghouse Electronic Systems in 1996 for US$3.6 billion, which brought radar and electronic warfare and is the origin of much of the present Mission Systems sector, Logicon in 1997, Ryan Aeronautical in 1999, which brought the Global Hawk unmanned aircraft, Litton Industries in 2001 for about US$5.1 billion, Newport News Shipbuilding in 2001 for about US$2.6 billion after a contest with General Dynamics, and TRW in 2002 for approximately US$7.8 billion, which brought space systems, satellites and a large laser and sensor business.

An attempted merger with Lockheed Martin in 1997 was blocked by the Department of Justice and the Department of Defense on competition grounds, a decision that effectively defined the limit of consolidation and left five large American prime contractors rather than four.

The result was a company spanning aircraft, ships, satellites, electronics and information technology, assembled quickly and never fully integrated, which is the background to the divestments that followed.

Refocusing, 2003 to 2019

Ronald Sugar, chief executive from 2003 to 2009, and Wes Bush, from 2010 to 2018, reversed much of the expansion.

Shipbuilding was spun off in March 2011 as Huntington Ingalls Industries, which took Newport News, where American nuclear aircraft carriers are built, and the Gulf Coast yards. The separation was a judgement that shipbuilding's economics, with very long cycles and different customers, did not fit the rest of the business. Advisory services were sold to CACI in 2011, and the federal information technology and mission support business was sold to Veritas Capital in February 2021 for US$3.4 billion.

The company moved its headquarters from Los Angeles to Falls Church, Virginia, in 2011, an explicit acknowledgement that proximity to Washington mattered more than proximity to its factories.

The principal addition in this period was Orbital ATK, acquired in June 2018 for approximately US$7.8 billion including debt, which brought solid rocket motors, tactical missiles, ammunition, small and medium launch vehicles and the Cygnus cargo spacecraft that resupplies the International Space Station. The Federal Trade Commission cleared the transaction subject to a condition that Northrop Grumman supply solid rocket motors to competing missile bidders on non-discriminatory terms, since it had become one of only two suppliers in the United States.

The acquisition became the Innovation Systems sector and was broken up from 1 January 2020, most of it folding into a new Space Systems sector.

The defining win of the period was the B-21 Raider. Northrop Grumman beat a Boeing and Lockheed Martin team for the Long Range Strike Bomber contract in October 2015, a result Boeing protested unsuccessfully. The B-21, publicly unveiled in December 2022 and first flown in November 2023, is intended to replace the B-1 and B-2 and eventually the B-52, with a planned buy of at least 100 aircraft at a target unit cost far below the B-2's. It is developed under an unusually strict cost-plus then fixed-price structure in the early production lots, and Northrop Grumman has taken substantial charges on those lots, disclosing more than US$1.5 billion in losses attributable to production of the first aircraft.

2020 to 2026

Space has been the fastest-growing part of the business.

NASA awarded Northrop Grumman a US$935 million contract in June 2020 for the Habitation and Logistics Outpost module of the Lunar Gateway, derived from the Cygnus spacecraft, and in March 2021 the contract for the Mars Ascent Propulsion System, a solid-fuelled rocket intended to launch samples collected by the Perseverance rover from the Martian surface. The company won a US$298 million sole-source contract in September 2020 for the Evolved Strategic Satcom programme, an anti-jam communications satellite system replacing Advanced Extremely High Frequency, on which it had been a subcontractor to Lockheed Martin.

It ended development of the OmegA launch vehicle in September 2020, having concluded that it could not compete for national security launch against SpaceX and United Launch Alliance.

In August 2022 it announced that production of the engines and structures for its Antares rocket would move from Russia and Ukraine to the United States in partnership with Firefly Aerospace, producing the Antares 330, and in May 2025 it invested US$50 million in Firefly to support the Eclipse vehicle.

The company unveiled the Manta Ray in May 2024, an uncrewed underwater vehicle developed for DARPA. It is designed for very long duration and range, gliding by altering its buoyancy and supplementing this with two four-bladed propellers on its wings, and is capable of resting on the sea floor for extended periods with minimal human oversight.

In September 2024 it won the Missile Defense Agency's competition for the Glide Phase Interceptor, intended to engage hypersonic glide vehicles during the middle of their flight, beating Raytheon. In 2025 it secured a Space Force contract to demonstrate in-orbit satellite refuelling, technology developed from its Mission Extension Vehicle, which in 2020 became the first spacecraft to dock with and extend the life of a commercial satellite already in orbit.

Northrop Grumman was sanctioned by the Chinese government on 15 September 2023 in response to American arms sales to Taiwan, one of a series of such designations affecting American defence firms and of limited practical effect given that the company does not sell to China.

Kathy Warden became chief executive on 1 January 2019 and chair in 2020, having joined from General Dynamics and previously Veridian.

Operations

Aeronautics Systems

Aeronautics Systems designs and builds crewed and uncrewed aircraft and is headquartered at Redondo Beach with major facilities at Palmdale, California, where the B-2 was built and the B-21 is being built, and at Melbourne, Florida.

Its programmes include the B-2 Spirit, of which 21 were built and 19 remain, and the B-21 Raider, a flying wing of smaller size intended for much lower operating cost and produced with an open systems architecture to allow subsystems to be replaced without redesigning the aircraft.

Uncrewed systems include the RQ-4 Global Hawk and its naval derivative the MQ-4C Triton, high-altitude long-endurance surveillance aircraft, and the MQ-8 Fire Scout rotary-wing drone. The company is also the prime contractor for the E-2D Advanced Hawkeye, the carrier-borne airborne early warning aircraft in continuous development since 1960, and builds major structures for the Boeing and Lockheed Martin aircraft including the centre fuselage of the F-35 and the fuselage for the F/A-18E/F.

Defense Systems

Defense Systems covers missiles, munitions, propulsion and sustainment. It includes the solid rocket motor business acquired with Orbital ATK, which supplies motors for a large share of American missiles including those built by competitors; tactical missiles including the AARGM anti-radiation missile family; ammunition, including the operation of the Lake City Army Ammunition Plant, the largest small arms ammunition facility in the United States; and weapons sustainment.

Its largest programme is the LGM-35A Sentinel, the replacement for the Minuteman III intercontinental ballistic missile force, awarded in 2020 after Boeing declined to bid on the ground that Northrop Grumman's acquisition of Orbital ATK had given it control of the solid rocket motors. The programme has since incurred a very large cost increase, breaching the Nunn-McCurdy threshold in 2024 with a reported rise of more than 80 per cent, driven principally by the cost of replacing the silo and command infrastructure rather than the missile itself. The Pentagon certified the programme to continue after restructuring it.

Mission Systems

Mission Systems, largely descended from Westinghouse and from Litton, builds radar, electronic warfare, communications, navigation and command systems, and is the least visible and among the most profitable parts of the company.

Its products include the AN/APG-77 and APG-81 fire control radars for the F-22 and F-35, the SABR retrofit radar for the F-16, the AN/SPY-6 competitor systems for naval radar, the APN-241 and a very large range of electronic warfare equipment, laser systems, and inertial navigation. It also supplies cyber and intelligence systems to the national agencies, work whose scale is not publicly disclosed.

The Integrated Battle Command System, an air and missile defence command network for the Army, has been the sector's most troubled programme, missing its first deadline in 2012 and assessed by the Director of Operational Test and Evaluation in 2016 as neither mature nor stable. It has since reached production and has been sold to Poland.

Space Systems

Space Systems builds satellites, launch vehicles and spacecraft, and includes most of the former TRW and Orbital ATK space businesses.

Its best-known product is the James Webb Space Telescope, for which Northrop Grumman was prime contractor. The telescope was delivered many years late and far over budget, at a final cost of around US$10 billion against an early estimate of US$500 million, and has operated since its launch in December 2021 with a performance exceeding its specification and with a deployment sequence of several hundred single-point failures that all succeeded.

Other work includes the Cygnus cargo spacecraft, which resupplies the International Space Station under commercial contract; the Antares launch vehicle; the HALO module for the Lunar Gateway; national security satellites whose details are classified; the Mission Extension Vehicle family for in-orbit servicing; and the ground stations for the Next-Generation Overhead Persistent Infrared missile warning programme.

Corporate affairs

Governance and headquarters

Kathy Warden has been chief executive since January 2019 and chair since 2020, and is one of a small number of women to lead a large defence contractor. Her predecessors were Wes Bush, Ronald Sugar and Kent Kresa.

The headquarters moved in 2011 from Century City in Los Angeles to Falls Church, Virginia, a few miles from the Pentagon. The building, opened in 2011, was designed to a high environmental standard and is considerably smaller than the company's principal operating sites, reflecting that its function is government relations and corporate management rather than engineering.

Finances

Revenue has run in the region of US$36 billion to US$42 billion in recent years, with operating margin typically between 10 and 12 per cent, a figure characteristic of a business whose contracts are largely cost-plus or negotiated fixed-price with the government as sole customer.

Approximately 85 per cent of sales are to the United States government, and international sales, principally to allied governments through Foreign Military Sales, make up most of the remainder. Backlog, the value of contracted work not yet performed, typically stands at around two years of revenue and is the figure analysts watch most closely.

The company pays a rising dividend and has repurchased shares steadily. Its share price has risen substantially over the past decade, with pronounced movements tied to geopolitical events and to appropriations decisions.

The losses taken on the early B-21 production lots, which arose because the company bid fixed prices before inflation and supply chain costs rose, are the clearest recent illustration of the risk in fixed-price development contracting, a structure the Pentagon has favoured to control cost and which several primes have said they will no longer accept for development work.

Political activity

Northrop Grumman maintains one of the larger lobbying operations in Washington, spending in the region of US$10 million to US$14 million a year, and operates a political action committee funded by employee contributions that distributes to members of both parties, weighted toward those on the armed services and appropriations committees.

Movement of personnel between the company and government is routine and is the subject of standing criticism. Retired flag officers and senior civilian officials join defence contractors, and executives take government appointments; the practice is regulated by cooling-off periods and recusal rules that critics regard as inadequate.

The company's advertising in Washington publications and its sponsorship of policy institutions is directed at an audience of a few thousand people and is a well-documented feature of how defence procurement is contested.

Notable products

Aircraft

The combined company's lineage includes a large number of aircraft of historical significance.

From Grumman: the FF-1 biplane fighter of 1931, the first American carrier aircraft with retractable landing gear; the F4F Wildcat, which carried the Navy through the first year of the Pacific war; the F6F Hellcat, produced in over 12,000 examples and credited with a kill ratio unmatched by any other fighter; the TBF Avenger torpedo bomber; the F9F Panther, the Navy's first successful jet fighter; the A-6 Intruder, an all-weather attack aircraft in service from 1963 to 1997; the EA-6B Prowler electronic warfare aircraft; the E-2 Hawkeye, first flown in 1960 and still in production as the E-2D; the C-2 Greyhound carrier transport; the OV-1 Mohawk observation aircraft; and the F-14 Tomcat, the variable-geometry fleet air defence fighter flown by the Navy from 1974 until 2006 and by Iran since 1976.

From Northrop: the N-9M and XB-35 flying wings; the P-61 Black Widow, the first American aircraft designed from the outset as a night fighter; the F-89 Scorpion; the T-38 Talon, first flown in 1959 and still the Air Force's principal advanced jet trainer; the F-5 Freedom Fighter and F-5E Tiger II, exported to more than thirty countries; the YF-17 Cobra, which became the F/A-18; and the B-2 Spirit.

From Ryan, acquired in 1999: the Firebee target drone family, the Model 147 reconnaissance drones used extensively over Vietnam and China, and the Global Hawk.

Spacecraft and space systems

From Grumman: the Apollo Lunar Module, the only crewed vehicle to have landed on another celestial body, whose ascent stage worked six times out of six and whose descent stage served as a lifeboat for the crew of Apollo 13.

From TRW: Pioneer 1 and 10, the Compton Gamma Ray Observatory, the Chandra X-ray Observatory, a long line of classified reconnaissance satellites, and the Tracking and Data Relay Satellite system.

From Orbital ATK: the Pegasus air-launched rocket, the first privately developed orbital launch vehicle; the Minotaur and Antares launchers; and the Cygnus cargo spacecraft.

Under the combined company: the James Webb Space Telescope, the Mission Extension Vehicle, and the HALO module for the Lunar Gateway.

Workforce and facilities

Northrop Grumman employs approximately 97,000 people, a very large proportion of whom hold United States security clearances, which constrains recruitment to American citizens for much of the work and makes the company's labour market narrow and competitive.

Principal sites include Palmdale and Redondo Beach in California; Melbourne, Florida; Baltimore and Linthicum in Maryland, inherited from Westinghouse; Rocket Center, West Virginia and Promontory, Utah for propulsion; Magna, Utah for Sentinel; Dulles, Virginia for space; Bethpage on Long Island, much reduced from its peak of tens of thousands of workers; and Lake City, Missouri for ammunition.

The company operates apprenticeship and engineering development programmes at scale, sponsors university research, and is among the largest employers of engineers in several of the regions in which it operates. Its workforce is unionised in parts, principally in manufacturing, and it has experienced occasional industrial action, including a strike at the Sunnyvale and Magna propulsion facilities.

Timeline

1929 Grumman Aircraft Engineering is founded on Long Island by Leroy Grumman, Jake Swirbul and William Schwendler.
1939 Jack Northrop founds Northrop Corporation at Hawthorne, California.
1943 The F6F Hellcat enters service.
1947 The YB-49 flying wing flies; it is cancelled in 1949 and the airframes destroyed.
1959 The T-38 Talon first flies.
1969 Grumman's Apollo Lunar Module lands on the Moon.
1974 The F-14 Tomcat enters service.
1981 Northrop wins the Advanced Technology Bomber contract.
1988 The B-2 Spirit is publicly revealed; Jack Northrop had died in 1981 after being shown a model.
1994 Northrop acquires Grumman for approximately US$2.1 billion.
1996 Acquires Westinghouse Electronic Systems.
1997 A proposed merger with Lockheed Martin is blocked.
2001 Acquires Litton Industries and Newport News Shipbuilding.
2002 Acquires TRW for approximately US$7.8 billion.
2011 Spins off Huntington Ingalls Industries; moves headquarters to Falls Church, Virginia.
2015 Wins the Long Range Strike Bomber contract, later the B-21 Raider.
2018 Acquires Orbital ATK for approximately US$7.8 billion.
2019 Kathy Warden becomes chief executive.
2020 Wins the Sentinel intercontinental ballistic missile programme.
2021 Launches the James Webb Space Telescope; sells the federal IT business to Veritas Capital.
2022 Unveils the B-21 Raider in December.
2023 The B-21 makes its first flight in November.
2024 Sentinel breaches the Nunn-McCurdy cost threshold and is restructured; wins the Glide Phase Interceptor competition.
2025 Invests US$50 million in Firefly Aerospace; wins a Space Force in-orbit refuelling demonstration.

Criticism and controversies

Contract fraud and defective products

Northrop and its successors have been the subject of a long sequence of fraud actions, several of them substantial.

In the late 1980s and early 1990s Northrop faced criminal and civil proceedings over falsified testing on the MX missile guidance system and the AGM-129 cruise missile, pleading guilty in 1990 and paying US$17 million.

The most significant modern case originated with Robert Ferro, an employee of TRW, who discovered in 1995 that satellite components made for the Air Force were faulty and likely to fail in service. TRW suppressed his report and withheld the information even after a satellite carrying the components experienced serious anomalies in orbit. Ferro sued under the federal whistleblower provisions of the False Claims Act. Northrop Grumman, which had acquired TRW in 2002, settled on 2 April 2009 for US$325 million, of which Ferro received US$48.8 million. The company said it believed TRW had acted properly under its contracts and that it had substantive defences.

A 1999 suit alleged that the company had knowingly supplied defective aircraft to the Navy and sought US$210 million. In 2001 federal investigators examined more than US$100 million of alleged systematic overcharging for radar jammers and other equipment used on the B-1, F-15 and B-2. In 2003 the company paid US$111.2 million to settle claims of overcharging for space projects during the 1990s.

Export control violations

State Department investigators found that Litton Industries, acquired in 2000, had provided portions of the source code used in guidance and navigation system interfaces aboard Air Force One to a company in Russia in 1998. Northrop Grumman agreed to pay a US$15 million fine for 110 violations of the Arms Export Control Act and the International Traffic in Arms Regulations occurring between September and November 1998.

State Department filings further stated that between 1994 and 2003 the company had failed to notify the department of transfers of computer guidance systems to Angola, Indonesia, Israel, China, Ukraine and Yemen.

Virginia information technology outage

Under a US$2.4 billion contract to operate the Commonwealth of Virginia's information technology, a storage failure between 25 August and 2 September 2010 took down systems for 26 of the state's 89 agencies. Approximately 45,000 citizens were unable to renew driving licences before expiry, and Governor Bob McDonnell said that some data might have been permanently lost. Northrop Grumman apologised and funded an investigation. The contract, which had been contentious from its signature in 2005, was renegotiated and not renewed.

Environmental record

Legacy manufacturing sites have produced serious and long-running contamination problems, the most severe at Bethpage on Long Island, where Grumman and the Navy operated from the 1930s.

Solvents including trichloroethylene, together with chromium and radiological material, entered the groundwater and formed a plume several miles long and hundreds of feet deep moving toward the drinking water supplies of communities in Nassau County. Remediation has been under way for decades, the cost is estimated in the billions of dollars, and litigation between Northrop Grumman, the Navy, the State of New York and local water districts over responsibility has continued for many years. A state plan requiring full containment and treatment was approved in 2020.

Other sites with contamination histories include the former TRW and Litton facilities, several California locations, and areas around ordnance plants.

The company reports on emissions and has set reduction targets, and it has invested in energy efficiency at its facilities, but the environmental profile of the business is dominated by legacy liabilities rather than by current operations.

Weapons supply and protest

Northrop Grumman's supply of weapons and components used by Israel during the Gaza war made it a target of protest from 2023, including blockades of facility entrances in San Diego and in Plymouth, Minnesota. Students on hunger strike at Brown University named the company among those from which they demanded the university divest, and similar demands were made on a number of campuses and public pension funds.

The company's products are also used in conflicts elsewhere, and it has been named in reporting on the Saudi-led campaign in Yemen, on which American arms sales were partially restricted and then resumed.

The general criticism directed at defence contractors, that their business model creates an institutional interest in the persistence of conflict and that their lobbying shapes the policies that determine their revenue, is applied to Northrop Grumman as to its peers. The company's answer, which is the industry's, is that it supplies capabilities that elected governments decide to buy and that the decisions are made by those governments rather than by it.

Assessment

Northrop Grumman is the least publicly visible of the large American defence companies and, by some measures, the most technically ambitious. Its portfolio is weighted toward programmes that either work at the limit of what is possible or do not work at all: stealth aircraft, strategic missiles, large space telescopes, uncrewed vehicles that operate for months without supervision.

The B-2 and the James Webb Space Telescope illustrate the pattern in both directions. Each cost far more than projected and took far longer. Each, once delivered, performed to a standard that nothing else has matched. The B-21 is the test of whether the company can repeat the achievement at a cost the customer will accept, and the losses on the early lots indicate that the answer is not yet settled.

The strategic position is strong and narrow. Almost all revenue comes from one customer, that customer is committed to the recapitalisation of its nuclear forces and to competition with China over the coming two decades, and Northrop Grumman is the prime contractor for two of the three legs of that recapitalisation. The corresponding exposure is that a change in policy, a Nunn-McCurdy breach that is not certified, or a decision to restructure a programme can remove a large fraction of the business at once, and that fixed-price development contracting transfers risk the company has demonstrated it cannot always price.

The ethical questions attached to the company are those attached to the industry, and they are not resolved by the fact that its customer is a democratic government. They are sharpened by the fraud record, which is extensive, and by the environmental liabilities, which will outlast everyone now working there.