Hearing the Roar

By Brandon Hartman

When the deep rumbles echoed across the hills and valleys near his childhood home, Mike Otto would pause whatever he was doing to listen. 

Those sounds — distant roars bouncing off surrounding ridges — sparked something in him. Growing up just down the road from the Naval Industrial Reserve Ordnance Plant at the Allegany Ballistics Laboratory (ABL) in West Virginia— an area known locally as Rocket Center — Mike didn’t just hear the rocket motor tests; he dreamed of being part of them. 

That dream would eventually become a reality. Forty years ago, Mike walked through ABL’s gates for the first time, starting as a technician manufacturing hardware for rocket motor designs. He remembers the hands-on precision of that early work. 

“Back then, computers were just being introduced into engineering work,” said Mike, who today works as an engineering manager for Northrop Grumman in the ABL. 

“There were just a few shared workstations for all engineers to share, and PCs weren’t being deployed across the site until a few years later. We were using a lot of 1950s era manual equipment with no computer driven capability.” 

Today, Mike leads many of the operations and processes in ABL’s integrated machine shop, where his team produces metal and composite hardware essential to plant operations and advanced missile systems. Utilizing innovations such as advanced propellant, robotic manufacturing and innovative data collection processes, Mike and his colleagues help Northrop Grumman develop new rocket motors in record time that can travel farther, faster and more affordably than ever.

“It’s incredible to see how far we’ve come as an industry and a site,” said Mike. “The advanced systems and technology we use were simply unimaginable back then. But what hasn’t changed is the pride people have in their work here.”