L3Harris cuts ribbon on $125 million expansion in Fort Wayne
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(Provided Photo/L3Harris)
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(Provided Photo/L3Harris)
Florida-based L3Harris Technologies Inc. cut the ribbon Wednesday morning on a $125 million expansion of its Fort Wayne operations.
The project features an expanded, 95,000-square-foot payload integration facility, which is designed to support the design, development and production of next-generation technology for the company’s missile defense and weather programs.
The expansion is also expected to create 50 new jobs with an average annual salary of $109,000.
Rob Mitrevski, vice president and general manager of spectral solutions at L3Harris, told Inside INdiana Business the expansion was a long time coming.
“We’ve won about a little over $3.5 billion worth of new business over the last six years,” Mitrevski said. “We saw the need for space-based production coming in front of us. Even before we won all that, our company made a decision to expand and create space-based production scale, which is something that doesn’t really exist in the industry.”
L3Harris develops advanced infrared sensors at its Fort Wayne operation that are designed to deliver fast, accurate and reliable data from orbit around Earth for weather and defense purposes.
On the weather side, the company builds meteorological imaging instruments for satellites used by NASA and the National Oceanic Atmospheric Administration to support severe weather forecasting.
On the missile defense side, L3Harris currently has five satellites in orbit and nearly three dozen in the works for the Space Development Agency and the Missile Defense Agency.
“There’s a significant demand from both our civil weather customer, but particularly our missile defense customer, in creating production scale, and that production scale is something that can be accomplished through the facility that we’re opening here,” Mitrevski said.
L3Harris said the expansion—which involved renovating 25,000 square feet of existing space and adding 70,000 square feet of new space—triples its manufacturing and testing capacity. The project gives the company the ability to produce 48 payloads per year for its customers.
“President Trump’s administration is talking about a ‘Golden Dome’ for the nation. That’s really about missile defense from space in part, and it’s something that we’re doing currently,” Mitrevski said. “This demonstrates that we are ready to take on the challenge that the administration has placed on the industry, that [we] have been able to think ahead about this need coming in our position today to make it happen, rather than a promise of making it happen tomorrow. It’s really verifiable evidence that we can do it today.”
L3Harris currently employs more than 600 people in Indiana. Mitrevski said he believes Indiana is an underrated place to find talent, and the company is confident it will find the people it needs to fill the new jobs.
“We’ve been able to recruit a 20% growth in our workforce over the last few years,” he said. “About 50% of my workforce has turned over due to retirements and growth. And as a six-decade business, we have a responsibility to create knowledge transfer plans and a seamless transition from generation to generation. So talent has been very important to us over the years, and we find Indiana a great place for that talent.”
The latest expansion follows a 45,000-square-foot expansion that L3Harris completed in 2021 to support the company’s missile defense program.
Mitrevski said the company is in growth mode when it comes to both missile defense and weather efforts.
“We see ourselves as being in the protection business in this part of the company, either from near-peer threats…or from natural disasters that come with our weather heritage,” he said. “So I think we’re in a good place for continued growth, leveraging these investments that we’ve made throughout the last few years in not only the building but in technology and capability and workforce development, et cetera, to create that set of solutions that our customer needs even before they realize they need it.”