Helping kick off a busy week here in Madison County, Raytheon hosted a ribbon cutting for its new Interceptor Engineering Center in its facility at 401 Jan Davis.

The new Interceptor Engineering Center is an expansion of the facility in Tucson, Arizona.

The Interceptor Program is a missile defense program focusing on detecting and destroying short, intermediate, and long-range ballistic threats. Work at the new facility will include the development of Interceptor’s sensors. According to Jen Hubbard, President of Strategic Missile Defense at Raytheon, the development of the new center marks the first time critical Interceptor engineering work has taken place in Huntsville.

“The investments that this company is doing hopefully, in this center as well as the manufacturing facility on the arsenal, in our talent and our infrastructure will help not only the community grow and the company grow but also support the very, very needed security programs that this country needs us to be working on,” said Hubbard, also noting the new facility’s close proximity to the U.S. Missile Defense Agency.

Huntsville Site Executive Michael Cox clarified that the facility has already earned its security accreditation, held its first meeting that morning, and is fully operational.

“You got this up and running doing the things you do,” Cox said, addressing Raytheon employees and contractors.

“We talk about Centers of Excellence and the geospatial world, which is kind of the foundation world of everything that we do, the geospatial world, the cyber world, the energy world, and we have stood up teams on energy, on cyber, on Geospatial,” Mayor Tommy Battle said. “But each of those ties back into missile interceptors; it ties back into the whole idea of us having the Centers of Excellence that work on hypersonic work on directed energy.”

Following a countdown, Hubbard cut the ribbon, and attendees were dismissed for refreshments. For more information, please visit www.rtx.com.