(Tribune News Service) — Halfway through a $115 million expansion of its Redstone missile integration facility in Huntsville, Ala., Raytheon is looking to deepen its investment in the area.

The company, a unit of RTX Corp., is on track to finish construction in November and bring the 26,000 square-foot addition online in January. And the expansion has not interrupted its day-to-day work for global defense clients, a company executive told AL.com on Friday.

“The fantastic part about this is we’re doing all this while we’re continuing to operate, while we’re continuing to put out all-up-rounds, while we’re continuing to deliver to the warfighter,” said Michael Cox, who represents the three business units — Raytheon, Pratt & Whitney and Collins Aerospace — as RTX site executive in Huntsville.

The expansion, which broke ground last year, is expected to bring 185 new jobs to the area. When complete, RTX will be employing about 2,200 in Alabama, over 1,000 of them in the Huntsville area. Huntsville is one of just two RTX locations to house facilities for all three units.

For the initial hiring phase of the Redstone facility, “We’ll draw from the local community — primarily — for the manufacturing jobs, those integration and test folks, and engineers,” Cox said.

Raytheon’s Redstone facility is the final integration point for numerous missile programs — including nine variants of the Standard Missile family — for the Missile Defense Agency, U.S. Navy and other defense customers. The company has won missile contracts worth over $2 billion this year alone.

With the expanded missile integration facility, “We are scaling up for the future,” Cox said. “We have a few new programs that we would like to bring in at some point in time … but certainly what we want to do is increase our capacity, increase our throughput, so that we can deliver more systems [more quickly] to the warfighter, to our customers and to our allies.”

Raytheon had also planned to work on the glide phase interceptor (GPI) at its expanded Redstone missile integration facility. The GPI is a hypersonic missile defense system.

Yet the Missile Defense Agency chose Northrop Grumman last year to proceed to full production. Raytheon launched a bid protest action in response, which is currently being heard before a federal claims court in Washington, D.C. The judge ruled in February that the challenge can continue.

The GPI is designed to defeat hostile missiles in their “glide phase,” which follows a ballistic launch. During the glide phase, hypersonic missiles – which travel many times the speed of sound — pose a unique threat because they are faster and more maneuverable than ballistic missiles.

Hypersonic missile defense is a key part of President Donald Trump’s “Golden Dome” proposal, which has drawn interest from Raytheon and other defense contractors. In a January earnings call just days after Trump announced what was then called “Iron Dome,” Christopher Calio, RTX president and CEO called it, “a significant opportunity for us; something right in our wheelhouse.”

Although details are scarce so far, the president’s order signaled new investment and funding opportunities for anti-missile programs, particularly space-based initiatives.

Regardless of what the Golden Dome architecture eventually entails, the Redstone expansion could lead to “significant growth” in Raytheon’s missile defense programs, according to Cox.

“We have significant capability in terms of combat-proven systems,” he said. “Being able to bring more and more work here is something we’re looking forward to.”

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