Anduril has officially brought the Solid Rocket Motor (SRM) plant in Mississippi as it struggles to fulfill America’s requirement for space and defense missions and to challenge a decades of dummy between two major defense contractors.
The Mississippi plant will be able to produce 6,000 regular engines per year by the end of 2026, enough volume to place Anduril as the “third” SRM supplier of the United States. More than 700 engines have already passed a static test. These engines are used for a range of motor weapons, such as rocket explorators, and even deep expansion detectors.
A handful of promising startups is pushing behind them as demand rises for weapons after the Russian invasion of Ukraine and increasing tensions in the South China Sea. The Defense Department was willing to boost US arsenals, which awards millions of funding to newcomers such as Ursa Major and X-Bow Systems to get their products from the original to commercialization.
As more SRM manufacturers come online, the vulnerability of another part of the supply chain becomes even more obvious.
Each of the engines that produce these companies still need ammonium (AP), a powerful oxidant made on a scale by a single specialized producer: American Pacific, or AMPAC, in Utah.
Northrop Grumman, a weapon manufacturer using SRMS, has invested more than $ 100 million to create an AP production line, but this production has a slow scale due to the high Army certification standards for certification, Reported Wall Street Journal last year. Northrop did not respond to TechCrunch’s request for comments.
The AP supply chain is a chuck is noticeable by suppliers, including Anduril. The risks remain the same, such as accidents and fires that are capable of destroying significant assets, but the company believes that the restoration of a second supplier is vital and will welcome additional suppliers, according to the company.
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This is not a new issue, but as the SRM Duopoly owned by Northrop Grumman and the Aerojet Rocketdyne of L3Harris is increasingly caused by Anduril and others, emphasizes a supply chain.
Jerry McGinn, a former employee of the Higher Industrial Base at the Ministry of Defense, said the need for multiple AP suppliers declined as demand for SRMS collapsed in the 1990s. The Pentagon supported a “merger in the 1990s” Competitive without government subsidies, he said.
Today’s single source risk is less than the ability to resurrect the demand signal, he argued. “Capacity is never the matter,” he said. “It’s enough orders and 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 its capacity by 50%. The project is scheduled to be completed next year, a strict deadline, even if everything goes to the plan. AMPAC did not respond to TechCrunch’s request for comments about the state of this new line.
Balancing demand and delivery time is thin.
The leader of the redemption of the Pentagon Bill Laplante described it as “the tyranny of tradition time” when he spoke to legislators in February, warning the behavior of past “celebration-or-family” advice.
“Industry is also reasonably reluctant to build additional capacity” at risk “until they have a clear, consistent DOD demand signal, often with specific quantities of procurement for many years,” he said.
For its part, URSA has cut the process of producing additives to avoid traps that slow down conventional production approaches, one spokesman said. But even the most innovative constructed engines will still need the AP to burn.
Financing for the construction of SRM is part of a greater push for funding the industrial base. For McGinn, if Washington can original of the engines, it should be able to be original AP.
“If the development of a second source is imperative, then the government must focus on it by doing what they did with Ursa Major, X-Bow and so on-making original efforts with other companies to develop another AP source,” he said.
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