Honeywell gets $25.6M for nuclear-tough navigation gyro

The U.S. Air Force Research Laboratory has awarded Honeywell Aerospace $25.6 million to keep developing a small, radiation-hardened gyroscope accurate enough for “strategic” use, the class of navigation sensor that has to work in space and survive the effects of a nuclear environment.

The cost-plus-fixed-fee contract covers what the Pentagon calls the compact strategic gyroscope maturation project, the U.S. Department of War said. Honeywell will do the work in Clearwater, Florida, and is expected to finish by July 1, 2029. The laboratory’s office at Kirtland Air Force Base, New Mexico, is managing the contract.

Combined with accelerometers in an inertial navigation system, it lets a missile, satellite, ship or aircraft work out where it is and which way it is pointing without GPS or any other outside signal. “Strategic-grade” refers to the most accurate class of these sensors, used where drift has to stay extremely low for long periods, such as in ballistic missile guidance and satellite pointing. Radiation hardening means the sensor and its electronics are built to keep working when hit by the radiation found in space or produced by a nuclear blast.

The notice does not say which weapon or spacecraft the gyroscope is intended for.

The award builds on earlier Air Force Research Laboratory work with the same company. In early 2020, the laboratory’s Space Vehicles Directorate at Kirtland gave Honeywell a $41.6 million contract to design a Compact Strategic-Grade Gyroscope, Military & Aerospace Electronics reported. That five-year effort, carried out at Honeywell’s Phoenix site, called for building and testing four prototypes, refining the design into six strategic-grade units, developing a radiation-hardened custom chip and software for the gyro, flying it on an experimental satellite for a one-year mission in low Earth orbit, and laying out a path toward a gyroscope that could keep operating through the radiation and electromagnetic pulse of nuclear explosions. The earlier contract was scheduled to run through August 2025.

The Department of War did not say how much of the first project’s goals were met or whether the space flight took place. The new work is described as “maturation,” which in defense research usually means taking a design that has been shown to work and making it more reliable, easier to build and closer to use in a real system.

The contract was competitively awarded, and the government received two offers. Only $500,000 in fiscal 2026 research and development money was committed at the time of award, with the rest of the $25.6 million to be added in later years.

Honeywell’s Clearwater site is one of the company’s main centers for navigation and inertial sensor work. The notice did not name the second bidder.