By Mike Stone
WASHINGTON, July 1 (Reuters) - Defense tech startups are repurposing automotive chips and pipes used in fracking -- while copying production methods from drugmakers -- in an effort to deliver weapons to the Pentagon faster and at lower cost.
Soaring demand for rocket motors used to power missiles and other weapons has spurred new thinking about supply chains. Seeking big returns, Silicon Valley-style startups are now taking on defense companies that have long dominated the industry, pulled
into the competition by a need for production speed, high volume and lower costs, according to ten industry executives, experts and U.S officials interviewed by Reuters.
The U.S. has plowed through over fifty thousand rockets, missiles and other projectiles propelled by rocket motors since the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022 through the U.S. attack on Iran, Pentagon data shows. Washington is setting aside $53 billion and simplifying procurement rules to increase critical missile and rocket production.
CEOs from Lockheed, Boeing, and Raytheon parent RTX, among the largest military contractors, have warned that solid rocket motor shortages were hurting missile production.
Now, defense entrepreneurs must prove they can deliver. Pleasing the Pentagon brings huge benefits, including contracts with a government agency that has an annual budget of more than a trillion dollars and a seal of approval other governments want to see before buying from new contractors.
Challenges are ahead. All the new entrants will need to produce enough of the new weapons to meet growing demand. Many new entrants are making rocket motors for existing missiles, some are making the entire missile, but none of the companies have scaled up production to replace legacy contractors.
Legacy solid rocket motor makers Northrop Grumman and L3Harris said they have been pushing their own research and development to pull these new technologies like 3D printing and new mixing technologies.
FROM STEERING CARS TO STEERING MISSILES
California-based Castelion, which makes solid rocket motors and hypersonic weapons turned to the auto industry for sophisticated electronic components used in advanced driver assistance systems and electric vehicles to help steer its missiles to targets. These auto industry processors, known as Field-Programmable Gate Arrays, can be bought at a tenth of the cost and obtained six times faster than comparable versions used in the aerospace industry, Chief Operating Officer Sean Pitt said.
The oil and gas industry has been another important supply chain resource for Castelion. Rather than sourcing high-pressure metal tubes from aerospace vendors with long lead times, the company is using high-temperature, stress-rated precision machined tubes used to help crack open rocks in the fracking process.
These tubes are built to handle heat and pressure levels comparable to what is required for a rocket motor, but are sold by far more vendors, at lower prices, than the aerospace industry equivalent, Pitt said. Castelion, recently valued at nearly $3 billion, has won big Pentagon contracts to make over 500 hypersonic weapons.
Mixing rocket motor propellant is another area of innovation for startup Anduril. The company, among the more successful recent defense industry entrants with several billion dollars of contracts under its belt, is using a pharmaceutical industry technique to mix chemicals used in rocket motors.
Anduril, valued at $61 billion, has purchased Colorado-based FlackTek's bladeless mixers capable of processing multi-hundred-kilogram propellant batches in minutes rather than hours. Anduril says the machine delivers more than a tenfold increase in production throughput compared to its previous mixing systems. The bladeless mixers produce more than 24 times the output of conventional industrial mixers, which are more like a giant kitchen mixer with paddles that require time for cleaning.
The same bladeless centrifugal technology is used to produce precision compounds including liposome-based cancer treatments — applications where batch consistency and contamination control are as unforgiving as in weapons production.
Still, challenges lie ahead for new entrants trying to break into the solid rocket motor business. Tom Karako, director of the Missile Defense Project at think tank Center for Strategic and International Studies, said they include "the painstaking, multi-step manufacturing process of casting, curing, baking, x-raying and sanding that solid-fuel rocket motors require - followed by rigorous inspection."
Curing ovens and X-ray equipment remain a bottleneck for the industry, Karako added.
USING 3D PRINTING TO CUT PRODUCTION TIMES
Innovations have already had a dramatic impact on arms production. A 2024 case study from traditional rocket maker Northrop Grumman, estimated that replacing conventionally machined metal tooling with 3-D printed polymer tools reduces the amount of time it takes to create a production line from roughly a year to about six weeks, enabling a new rocket motor to be developed from scratch much more quickly.
X-Bow Systems is a New Mexico-based company that specializes in low-cost solid rocket motor (SRM) production through a process that utilizes 3D printing of propellants and motors.
The technology has the potential to reduce the time and cost of SRM production drastically. X-Bow has also said it can shorten the creation of a new production line - which makes 3D printed motors - from a three to six-year timeline to about twelve months. X-Bow already has a $191 million Pentagon contract for hundreds of solid rocket motors.
Texas-based Firehawk Aerospace founded in 2020, also uses 3D printing to manufacture SRMs at a fraction of the cost of traditional production methods. Firehawk says its manufacturing process cuts rocket fuel production time from up to 60 days to just 7 hours, at one-tenth the traditional cost. It enables custom designed missiles to be test-ready in a matter of months. Firehawk is backed by funding from venture capital firm 1789 Capital, a fund where President Donald Trump's son is a partner.
Government purchasing patterns will always be a limiting factor for startups. The Pentagon has traditionally bought rocket quantities annually, resulting in unpredictable demand shifts from year to year.
Lukas Czinger, CEO of Divergent Technologies which makes parts for missiles said "How can we get good multi-year agreements that don't roll off when administration changes? That's what businesses need to perform at low cost."
(Reporting by Mike Stone in Washington; Editing by Chris Sanders and Anna Driver)
