Honeywell Aerospace

Honeywell Aerospace is the aerospace division of Honeywell International, a Phoenix, Arizona-headquartered Fortune 100 industrial conglomerate, providing navigation, guidance, and control systems, sensors, and avionics for military and commercial aviation, launch vehicles, and spacecraft — with roots tracing to the Minneapolis Honeywell Regulator Company's aerospace work beginning in the 1930s and more than seven decades of space program involvement.

For space applications, Honeywell supplies inertial measurement units (IMUs) and inertial navigation systems (INS) — gyroscope and accelerometer packages that measure acceleration and rotation to calculate position, velocity, and attitude without external reference signals. These are critical for launch vehicle guidance (where GPS signals may be jammed or insufficient) and for spacecraft attitude determination during burns and maneuvers. Honeywell's HG9900, HG1700, and HG1900 IMU series are widely used in commercial and military launchers. The company's ring laser gyroscopes and MEMS-based accelerometers are mature, flight-heritage components qualifying for space-grade applications.

Star trackers — optical sensors that photograph star fields and compare the pattern against an onboard star catalog to determine spacecraft attitude with arc-second precision — are a Honeywell specialty product for satellite attitude determination and control systems (ADCS). The ST16 and ST-2000 star trackers are used across government and commercial satellite buses. Reaction wheel assemblies (RWAs) and control moment gyroscopes (CMGs) for attitude control are also produced by Honeywell, with CMGs specifically used on the International Space Station's attitude control system.

For launch vehicles, Honeywell provides flight computers, power electronics, and sensor packages. The company's navigation systems supported Apollo guidance (as part of MIT's Instrumentation Lab's electronics supply chain), Shuttle navigation, and continue to appear in Atlas V, Delta IV, and commercial launch vehicles.

Honeywell competes with Northrop Grumman (Litton division legacy inertial systems), Collins Aerospace (formerly UTC Aerospace), Safran (French inertial navigation), and Kearfott Corporation in the precision navigation segment. The space business is a modest portion of Honeywell Aerospace's ~$13 billion annual revenue.