Sacramento rocket pioneer Aerojet to be acquired by Lockheed Martin in $4.4B deal

Once it was one of the region’s most prestigious companies — an aerospace behemoth that put Sacramento in the thick of the Cold War and the race to the moon.

Now Aerojet, years removed from its glory days as a big Sacramento company, has been sold.

Late Sunday the rocket engine manufacturer, now known as Aerojet Rocketdyne Holdings and based in El Segundo, announced it is being taken over by Lockheed Martin Corp.

Aerojet said the deal is priced at $5 billion; Lockheed called it a $4.4 billion purchase.

The sale further divorces Aerojet from its Sacramento-area origins, which date to the earliest days of the Cold War. The company in 2016 moved its headquarters to Southern California. It announced in 2017 that it was moving its remaining manufacturing operations out of its Rancho Cordova campus and transferring them to Huntsville, Ala., while moving some administrative positions to El Segundo. The decision eliminated 1,100 jobs in Rancho Cordova and left but 300 workers in the region.

It wasn’t immediately clear what would happen to those remaining workers, as well as Aerojet’s plans to turn thousands of idle acres into homes and offices in the Rancho Cordova area. It also wasn’t clear whether the Aerojet brand would survive the takeover.

A spokesman for Aerojet couldn’t be reached for comment.

Aerojet is a $2 billion-a-year company with 5,000 employees across the country. Lockheed’s chief executive, James Taiclet, said the deal will expand his company’s “as the leading provider of 21st century warfare solutions.”

Lockheed, based in Maryland, already uses Aerojet engine systems and is looking to boost its capabilities to better compete with the likes of Elon Musk’s SpaceX, according to Reuters.

Aerojet has been looking for merger partners off and on for years as the aerospace industry consolidates. It acquired Rocketdyne in 2013 from Pratt & Whitney Aircraft. In 2015 it made a failed attempt to buy a Colorado rocket company, United Launch Alliance, which was half-owned by Lockheed.

“Joining Lockheed Martin is a testament to the world-class organization and team we’ve built and represents a natural next phase of our evolution,” Aerojet CEO Eileen Drake said in a prepared statement.

Aerojet’s local rocket engine-building operations date back to 1951. During the company’s hey-day, it employed 20,000 workers in Rancho Cordova.

As the Cold War and space race heated up, the Rancho Cordova site literally ran around the clock. It opened opened a swimming pool, summer camp for employees’ children and a company store that sold everything from golf clubs to refrigerators. The booms from the rocket engine tests could be heard for miles and were part of the background noise of greater Sacramento during much of the 1960s and ’70s.

President Lyndon Johnson once stopped in for a pep talk to the workers, as did U.S. astronauts Frank Borman and Neil Armstrong, the first man on the moon. It was said that Aerojet was the inspiration for “Captain Sacto,” a children’s TV show that ran on KCRA in the 1950s and ’60s.

Aerojet milestones

1942: Aerojet Engineering Corp. launched in March in Pasadena. It was an outgrowth of the rocket development activities of Dr. Theodore von Karman and five colleagues at Caltech.

1945: General Tire & Rubber Co. acquires Aerojet.

1947: First complete Aerobee rocket launched.

1951: Ground is broken on the future home of Aerojet’s extensive operations in Rancho Cordova.

1958: Aerojet receives the first Minuteman solid rocket propulsion system development contract.

1963: Local operations swell to nearly 21,000 employees. Aerojet’s growth was driven by contracts to produce propulsion systems for Titan and Minuteman intercontinental ballistic missiles, the Polaris submarine missile and the Aerobee rocket. Most significant, the nation’s space race with the Soviet Union and President John F. Kennedy’s call to put an American man on the moon drive the aerospace industry’s growth in the 1960s. For Aerojet, that included building key engines for the all-important Apollo space missions.

1964: President Lyndon B. Johnson stops off at the Rancho Cordova plant to witness a Titan engine test firing, also telling Aerojet workers that they are playing a significant role in the nation’s defense and space programs.

1968: In December, Apollo 8 brings the moon within reach as astronauts Frank Borman, James Lovell and William Anders became the first humans to orbit the moon. The Service Propulsion System sending the crew into lunar orbit was built by Aerojet.

1969: With representatives of Aerojet on-site at the Johnson Space Center in Houston on July 20, Apollo 11 astronauts Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin safely land on the moon’s surface, with Aerojet-made rockets and engineering again playing key roles in the historic mission.

1978: Aerojet is awarded a contract to develop Stage II of the Peacekeeper missile.

1984: GenCorp Inc. becomes parent holding company of Aerojet.

1988: Aerojet sales top $1 billion.

2002: Aerojet conducts successful qualification tests of a full-scale, 67-foot Atlas V solid rocket motor.

2005: The Titan rocket makes its final flight with Aerojet first- and second-stage liquid rocket engines, closing out a 50-year chapter.

2008: Aerojet technologies help Mars Phoenix land on the red planet using the first successful pulse mode-modulated descent.

2009: Aerojet, Solar Power Inc. and the Sacramento Municipal Utility District dedicate a 3.6-megawatt solar system and announce a 2.4-megawatt expansion at Aerojet’s local site.

2013: GenCorp acquires Pratt & Whitney Rocketdyne in a $550 million deal, leading to consolidation and formation of Aerojet Rocketdyne Inc.

2015: GenCorp changes its name to Aerojet Rocketdyne Holdings Inc.

2016: Aerojet Rocketdyne Holdings moves its corporate headquarters to El Segundo.

2017: On April 10, Aerojet Rocketdyne Inc. announces that it will relocate or eliminate about 1,100 of its 1,400 local jobs over the next 2½ years and shut down manufacturing operations in the Sacramento area.

Dec. 20: Lockheed Martin announces it will acquire Aerojet Rocketdyne in a deal valued at $4.4 billion dollars.

This story was originally published December 20, 2020 at 6:26 PM.