Scaled's business structure (Score 2, Informative)

Scaled Composites has been a wholly-owned entity of larger companies in the past: it was Beechcraft around the time Scaled was working on the Starship prototype, and Wyman-Gordon soon thereafter. The prototype output from the shop has been pretty consistent throughout the history of the company, so I highly doubt there'll be much change there. Both NG and Scaled have supposedly said as much in their announcements of the deal.

Northrop Grumman has been heavily involved in the Proteus program for several years now, and was looking at using an unmanned Proteus in production as their response for some DoD RFQ a short while back . And as previously noted, they did have 40% ownership prior to this announcement, and that would buy a fair amount of influence if that's what they were going for.

My guess is that NG wanted Scaled so they could wrap up Proteus whole cloth, and who knows, maybe even resurrect some older programs like ARES or ATTT, that Scaled had trouble getting DoD attention for back in the day. And with the cash infusion, Scaled will get the capital it probably needs to keep the SS2 program moving along and into low volume production, something you don't typicallly have to worry about with one-off prototypes that are their bread and butter.