Anduril has officially brought its high-volume solid rocket motor (SRM) factory online in Mississippi as it races to fulfill America’s demand for space and defense missions and challenge a decades-long duopoly between two major defense contractors.
The Mississippi factory will be able to produce 6,000 tactical motors a year by the end of 2026, enough volume to position Anduril as the United States’ “third” SRM supplier. More than 700 motors have already passed static test firing. These motors are used for a range of kinetic weapons, like missile interceptors, and even deep-space probes.
A handful of promising startups are pushing behind them as demand soars for weapons in the wake of the Russian invasion of Ukraine and mounting tensions in the South China Sea. The Defense Department has been keen to bolster American arsenals, awarding millions in funding to new entrants like Ursa Major and X-Bow Systems to take their products from prototype to commercialization.
As more SRM manufacturers come online, the vulnerability of another segment of the supply chain becomes even more apparent.
Every one of the motors these companies produce still needs ammonium perchlorate (AP), a powerful oxidizer that is made at scale by just one qualified producer: American Pacific, or AMPAC, in Utah.
Northrop Grumman, a manufacturer of weapons that use SRMs, has invested more than $100 million to establish an AP production line, but that production has been slow to scale due to the military’s high standards for certification, The Wall Street Journal reported last year. Northrop did not respond to TechCrunch’s request for comment.
The AP supply chain is a chokepoint felt by suppliers, including Anduril. The risks remain the same, like accidents and fires that have the ability to destroy important assets, but the company believes the restoration of a second supplier is vital, and would welcome additional suppliers, according to the company.
This is not a new issue, but as the SRM duopoly held by Northrop Grumman and L3Harris’ Aerojet Rocketdyne is increasingly challenged by Anduril and others, it highlights a vulnerability in the supply chain.
Jerry McGinn, a former senior industrial base official in the Department of Defense, said the need for multiple suppliers of AP dwindled as the demand for SRMs collapsed in the 1990s. The Pentagon backed a “merger-to-monopoly” in the 1990s, preferring to have one healthy provider rather than two struggling companies that couldn’t be competitive without government subsidies, he said.
Today’s single-source risk is less about capacity than about the demand signal resurgence, he argued. “Capacity is never the issue,” he said. “It’s just enough orders and lead time to create the fuel.”
AMPAC announced in April that its parent company would invest $100 million in a new AP production line, which would increase capacity by 50%. The project is scheduled to be complete next year, a tight deadline even if everything goes to plan. AMPAC did not respond to TechCrunch’s request for comment on the status of that new line.
Balancing demand and lead time is delicate.
Pentagon acquisition chief Bill LaPlante called it “the tyranny of lead time” when speaking to lawmakers in February, warning against the “feast-or-famine” procurement behavior of times past.
“Industry also reasonably remains reluctant to build additional capacity “at risk” until they have a clear, consistent demand signal from DoD, often with specific procurement quantities for multiple years,” he said.
For its part, Ursa Major touted its additive manufacturing process to avoid the pitfalls that slow conventional manufacturing approaches, a spokesperson said. But even the most innovatively made motors will still need AP to burn.
Funding for SRM manufacturing is part of a larger push to fund the industrial base. To McGinn, if Washington can prototype the motors, it should be able to prototype AP, too.
“If developing a second source is imperative, then the government should focus on that by doing what they did with Ursa Major, X-Bow, and so on — by doing prototype efforts with other companies to develop another source of AP,” he said.
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