Raytheon opens shop at U of A tech park on Tucson's south side

A new Raytheon engineering office at the University of Arizona’s south side tech park will help foster defense research collaborations and develop new UA talent, the defense giant said as the site was opened this week.

Raytheon President Wes Kremer and UA President Robert C. Robbins helped cut the ribbon during a private ceremony at the new office Thursday at The Refinery, a four-story building built for and leased by the UA in the tech park area of The Bridges multi-use development near East 36th Street and South Kino Parkway.

Raytheon announced in January it would open an office in 14,000 square feet of office space at The Refinery, which opened in early 2022 and also houses Tech Launch Arizona and other UA offices.

The company shares the secure top floor with UA Applied Research Corp., or UAARC, a nonprofit corporation set up by the university to handle sensitive defense and security projects.

Kremer said the new office, which will host about 100 employees, is an extension of Raytheon’s current research collaborations with the UA, citing expanded wind tunnels used to research hypersonic aircraft and research at the UA’s highly rated Wyant College of Optical Sciences, and future work with UA-ARC.

“What we want to do here is we want to continue to foster community,” Kremer said in an interview. “We have a lot of different things going on here with the University of Arizona, we have the hypersonic wind tunnel, the optics lab, we have all kinds of things that are going on here in Tucson, so we just want to continue to drive the innovation in that.”

Raytheon’s presence at The Refinery is part of a larger effort to expand community ties with Arizona’s universities to help with recruiting, as well as research and development.

In July, the company announced it would open a 28,000-square-foot engineering design center at ASU’s SkySong Scottsdale Innovation Center to further research and create a steady a pipeline of new workers.

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“We know that when we recruit locally, we do better, and so we’re going to try to work both Skysong and here as a base for recruiting,” Kremer said.

Robbins said Raytheon has been a major partner in research and supporter of the UA’s optics and aerospace schools, citing its advocacy in securing federal funding for major upgrades to the UA’s hypersonic wind-tunnel facilities.

Raytheon — a major provider of front-line missiles and other defense systems for the U.S. and allied nations — is Tucson’s biggest employer with about 12,000 workers at its main manufacturing campus at Tucson International Airport, a major facility at the UA Tech Park on South Rita Road and some smaller local offices.

The company’s proximity to UA-ARC is “fortuitous,” Robbins added.

“There’ll hopefully be some cross-pollination and some collaboration, realizing that they probably have to keep things pretty separate, but just having like-minded types of activity here is, I think, advantageous for both institutions and also for the community,” he said, adding that Raytheon’s presence will help attract other tech tenants to The Refinery.

Besides Tech Launch Arizona, the university’s technology commercialization arm, The Refinery hosts the University of Arizona Online, Distance and Continuing Education and an incubator outpost and programming through the University of Arizona Center for Innovation.