Holbrook maker of Mars mission equipment plans $2M expansion, move to Hauppauge

A local manufacturer of motors and movement devices that are used in military equipment and space exploration, including an uncrewed mission to Mars, will move to Hauppauge instead of leave New York State, executives said.

Island Components Group has rented 14,240 square feet at 210 Marcus Blvd. That’s nearly double the 7,500 square feet that it now occupies in Holbrook.

Executives said the $2 million expansion is taking place in Suffolk County rather than in Florida because of tax breaks from the county’s Industrial Development Agency.

The agency’s board voted unanimously last week to grant preliminary approval for a tax-aid package totaling $209,786, including a property-tax savings of $178,736 over 12 years, or 28%.

The additional space will accommodate Island Components’ work for aerospace, defense and space customers, such as the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, or NASA.

The company’s actuators, which convert energy into mechanical force to achieve movement, will be used in equipment that retrieves rocks from Mars and sends them to Earth. What NASA, and its partner, the European Space Agency, call the “Mars Sample Return Mission” is to be completed in the 2030s.

“Earlier this year, we were selected by NASA for the next Mars mission … where we will be helping with the return of samples of rocks and components back to Earth,” Rich Finucane, Island Components’ vice president of operations and product management, said at the IDA meeting. “It’s very exciting for us.”

Besides actuators, the company makes electrical motors, brakes, clutches and gearheads. It opened in the early 1990s in Bohemia and then moved to Holbrook.

Finucane said under the leadership of president Bill Brown, who joined Island Components in 2016, the company has reversed a sales decline and grown from 10 employees to 25. Records show they earn, on average, $81,000 per year.

The expansion calls for hiring an additional 14 workers in the next two years.

Brown, in a letter to the IDA, said Island Components had considered moving to Florida, home to some of its largest customers.

“As a small business, costs are always a factor and our survival, and more importantly growth, is highly dependent on how we can keep operating costs low,” he said last month. “Without [IDA] assistance, we will need to move out of state to accommodate our business growth.”

He continued, “We have simply run out of space at our current facility [in Holbrook], which makes it increasingly difficult to operate as we need.”

Island Components is a division of G.W. Lisk Co. in Clifton Springs, in the Finger Lakes region south of Rochester. Lisk has 620 employees and produces values and sensors for the same markets that Island Components serves.

Lisk purchased Island Components for an undisclosed amount in November 2021.

IDA executive director Anthony J. Catapano said Island Components is a member of the region’s legacy manufacturing industries — defense, aerospace and space exploration — that once were dominated by Grumman Corp. “It’s important to keep these industries here,” he said in an interview.

By James T. Madore

james.madore@newsday.comJamesTMadore

James T. Madore writes about Long Island business news including the economy, development, and the relationship between government and business. He previously served as Albany bureau chief.