In 1951, three young engineers opened a small shop in a dirt-floored airplane hangar in East Aurora, New York—no venture capital, no banking relationships, and one revolutionary product: a precision hydraulic servo valve the U.S. military would soon depend upon to guide its ballistic missile arsenal.
Within a decade, Moog servo valves were steering America’s intercontinental ballistic missiles. They helped carry Apollo astronauts to the Moon, commanded the Space Shuttle’s solid rocket boosters through 135 missions, and gave the B-2 Stealth Bomber its silent, lethal flight.
Today, Moog thrust vector control systems steer NASA’s Space Launch System on the Artemis missions, while Moog hardware aboard the Orion spacecraft keeps astronauts alive more than 252,000 miles from Earth. Moog technologies also appear on the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter and on commercial aircraft from Boeing, Airbus, and Embraer.
But this is more than engineering triumph. The founders banned time clocks, trusted workers to inspect their own work, and proved that mutual trust is not a soft ideal but a hard competitive edge—earning Moog a place among the original 100 Best Companies to Work for in America. From modest first-year sales to record revenues exceeding $4 billion, with more than 13,500 employees spanning the globe, this is 75 years of audacity, innovation, and the conviction that the hardest problems are always worth solving.
This interactive eBook features embedded videos and embedded audio quotes from executives, retirees, and key stakeholders who were interviewed during the research for this book.
