The rise in production of solid rocket motors for missiles has led to a supply chain crisis.
Orlando-based Helicon Chemical Company is a small business seeking to become a second-largest supplier of HTPB-45M, a binder used in most solid rocket motors (SRBMs).
But just as Helicon was planning to establish production in West Virginia, budgetary turmoil abruptly delayed the promised and desperately needed project. The Pentagon contract was worth $15 million.
The situation is exacerbated by the ongoing cutoff of funding for the small business research and development program, which provides about a third of Helicon's budget, and could worsen further if the government shuts down for a second time on January 30, the company's CEO, Jack Sarnicki, told Breaking Defense.
"Everything has come to a standstill," Sarnitsky said. "If we don't get the contract for the West Virginia facility and there's another government shutdown, my company could be in serious trouble. We'll probably have to consider laying off employees."
As military demand for ammunition has grown in recent years, demand for multiple launch rocket systems (MLRS) and the U.S. Navy's standard family of missiles has soared, along with the solid rocket motors that power them. This has prompted new players to enter the market and traditional suppliers to rapidly expand production. However, as several senior industry officials told Breaking Defense, this growth has not yet been seen in the fragile solid rocket motor supply chain, raising questions about the availability of sufficient scale to support this sector.
We don't really need a third supplier of solid rocket motors. I tell everyone they'll just use the same supply chain,
— L3Harris CEO Chris Kubasik said at the Jefferies Industrials conference in September.We need more companies making nozzles. We need more companies making igniters. We need more companies making housings. The third or fourth solid rocket motor supplier will turn to the same people with whom we already have an established supply chain, and they'll just have to fall to the back of the line.
More Pentagon involvement, both financially and in terms of attention to the issue, is also needed, said Tara Murphy Doherty, CEO of defense software company Govini.
Department leaders now have a real opportunity because they plan to spend more than $10 billion on additional ammunition as budget funds become available.
But “at the moment they will do everything exactly the same, but for some reason expect different results in terms of supply chain management.”
The problem of the "domino effect"
According to Govini, between 1995 and 2017, the US industrial base for solid rocket motors shrank from six companies to just two suppliers: Orbital ATK, acquired by Northrop Grumman in 2018, and Aerojet Rocketdyne, acquired by L3Harris in 2023. A third company, Norway's Nammo, produces solid rocket motors for some types of US weapons in Norway.
However, over the past four years, several companies have announced plans to expand the market for special-purpose solid-propellant rockets (SRMs) in hopes of gaining access to the seemingly significant funding from the US Department of Defense allocated for the development of new munitions. New market entrants include defense startups Anduril, Ursa Major, and X-Bow, as well as traditional defense companies such as General Dynamics. Both Northrop and L3Harris have announced their intention to increase production rates.
The problem is that, just as the core components of SRM have shrunk over time, so too has the supply chain: many materials and components are now available only from one or two companies, or with long lead times. Any impact on these companies could trigger a chain reaction throughout the entire SRM production line.
Potential bottlenecks include ignition safety devices, injectors, housings, and insulation, and executives say there's no one-size-fits-all solution. But perhaps the greatest concern is the supply chain of energetic materials and chemicals needed to operate solid rocket motors.
In 2025, Nammo officials discovered that the chemical company that produced the fuel component used in one of its solid rocket motors was going out of business, and there was no alternative supplier.
"This has caused a chain reaction, and the question becomes: What do we do?" said Andy Davis, Nammo's vice president of design and strategy. Davis declined to name the program or vendor, citing confidentiality.
He noted that in the rocket fuel world, small producers of specialized chemicals can quietly go bankrupt, and their defense industry clients won't know until it's too late to place final orders. This condemns rocket manufacturers to a lengthy and costly process of requalifying a new supplier.
One of the challenges you face that people don't understand is that rocket propellant formulations are made up of, say, 10-12 ingredients. These ingredients are carefully balanced and selected to ensure mechanical properties and burn rate. So if you take, say, aluminum powder, and you've tested a formulation with one of these components, and the manufacturer no longer supplies that aluminum, it's not as simple as, "I'll just take another aluminum powder and add it."
In such cases, companies essentially have to go through the entire formula development process for a given fuel again, Davis said.
"Then I'll need to recertify the fuel," he said. "Then I'll probably need to certify the rocket engine and maybe the rocket."
For smaller chemical suppliers, budget chaos could have a huge impact on delivery times. According to Sarnitsky, Helicon isn't relying solely on Defense Department funding for its new venture and intends to raise $15 million in private funding to supplement government investment. However, even after funding begins, Helicon will need 18 months to two years to obtain manufacturing approval and begin producing HTPB-45M for its customers, he added.
This means that every month of underfunding means another month until SRM engine manufacturers can find a second supplier of the chemical.
According to Govini, procuring the power components and fuel could take a year. Meanwhile, American Pacific Corporation (AMPAC) is the sole U.S. supplier of ammonium perchlorate—a key ingredient used to produce solid rocket motors—creating a "single point of failure" in the rocket supply chain, Govini asserts. AMPAC, which announced a $100 million investment in June to increase ammonium perchlorate production, did not respond to a request for comment.
Beyond AMPAC, the Department of Defense lacks a deeper understanding of the overall industrial base critical to solid rocket motor production, Govini states. The high degree of interdependence and common supplier base at the subcontracting level suggest that expanding solid rocket motor production will be difficult without increasing the number of suppliers of key components and materials.
Both domestic suppliers of solid rocket motors, Northrop and L3Harris, "depend on a few common suppliers for key components," and a disruption at either company, "whether it's a production delay, a quality control issue, or a catastrophic event like a factory fire, would simultaneously cripple the entire solid rocket motor manufacturing facility," Govini says.
One such disaster, unfortunately, occurred in October, when an explosion at Accurate Energetic Systems in Tennessee killed 16 people, injured others, and leveled one building. The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives estimates that between 24,000 (10,890 kg) and 28,000 pounds (12,700 kg) of explosives detonated on the day of the incident, with the explosion occurring in an area where explosive chemicals were mixed and heated.
According to an analysis conducted by Govini in October, Accurate Energetic Systems was an energy supplier to the solid rocket motor industry and held a subcontracting position with Aerojet Rocketdyne, Northrop and Nammo.
This incident should serve as a "wake-up call" for the Pentagon to take a more proactive role in managing its supply chain and ensuring the availability of secondary or even tertiary suppliers for critical materials, Howard Murphy Doherty said in an interview with Breaking Defense in October.
We actually noticed that this company showed up in our data on the risk factors list, and it was because there is a lack of redundancy in many of the critical systems, such as the solid rocket motors,
"Murphy Doherty said. A Breakthrough in the SRM Engine Supply Chain
According to industry leaders, chemicals aren't the only risk for internal combustion engines. Govini noted that some injectors take seven to ten months to deliver. Given already limited supply, startups and new entrants to the internal combustion engine market are taking extraordinary steps to secure the necessary components for engine production.
With the significant growth in demand for rocket engines, it is clear that there are already some bottlenecks at certain points, and if all existing and new suppliers work with the same subcontractors, even more bottlenecks and constraints will arise.
" said Brett Perry, head of rocket propulsion development at Anduril.According to Perry, in the case of ignition safety devices, supply chain risks can be mitigated by managing schedules and planning for required delivery times. Regarding other components, such as injectors, insulation, and engine housings, Anduril sees value in either attracting new suppliers to the industrial base or convincing existing suppliers to expand production of other necessary components, he added.
For example, Perry noted that Anduril engineers trained one of their nozzle suppliers to make engine housings, noting that the company had the necessary equipment to wind composite materials into larger structures.
"We were able to demonstrate this. We launched engines with this housing," Perry said. "For some new suppliers, who are completely new to this business, these are products that are still in the production process... It's a long-term investment."
Ursa Major, which will begin qualifying its launch vehicle class in 2026, is taking a slightly different approach. Rather than relying solely on expanding the existing launch vehicle supply chain, the Colorado-based startup is embracing vertical integration, said Bill Murray, vice president of products and engineering for the company's solid rocket systems business.
"We actually buy the powder and sinter it ourselves, and in Youngstown, Ohio, it becomes part of the metal motor components," Murray said. "We're really working hard to get composite motors used in a wide variety of munitions, primarily because the supply of steel motor casings is fundamentally challenging."
At the same time, Murray added that challenges such as igniters remain, and while "there's no one-size-fits-all solution," Ursa's current strategy is to manufacture and integrate its own ignition systems for most of its solid rocket motors. Meanwhile, to overcome the barriers associated with single-source chemical suppliers, Ursa intends to use fewer propellant components across its entire solid rocket motor family and also seek new suppliers.
There are many startups in the synthetic chemistry industry entering the solid rocket motor and supply market, and we are working with many of them to develop new methods for synthesizing chemicals that are more sustainable and automated.
Lockheed Martin and General Dynamics, which are working together to make GD the manufacturer of rocket motors for Lockheed's GMLRS munitions, see supply constraints on nozzles and isolators as a potential hurdle, said Jerry Broad, vice president of Lockheed's Solid Rocket Motor Manufacturing Center.
To allay those concerns, Lockheed plans to establish a manufacturing facility to make nozzles that could be used to produce MLRS (multiple launch rocket systems) and possibly other munitions in the future, Brode told reporters in October.
Current key SRM suppliers are also investing in their supply chain. L3Harris has invested over $250 million in pre-financing for long-lead materials, as well as pre-financing to cover the obsolescence of suppliers' raw materials. It has also directly invested over $30 million in upgrading its supplier base and expanding its workforce, said Scott Alexander, president of the company's Rocket Solutions division.
As a result, the company is seeing some signs of recovery. For example, after L3Harris invested in equipment for one of its engine case suppliers, that company increased its monthly production by 1000 percent, while investments in equipment and fixtures for a supplier producing insulated nozzles contributed to a 350 percent increase in capacity.
"It's no secret that there are separate sources of supply, and possibly even dual ones, and we continue to study this issue," Alexander said. "But if you ask me, 'What's the state of the supplier base?' it's improving in this regard."
Meanwhile, Northrop Grumman has invested "more than $1 billion" in its rocket engine manufacturing facilities and plans to double their production over the next four years, according to a company statement to Breaking Defense. The statement did not specify what portion of this investment was used to improve the supply chain.
We directly support efforts to diversify and enhance supply chain resilience, particularly for suppliers within our supply chain or who share sources with other companies. Northrop Grumman also supports U.S. government initiatives to enhance supply chain resilience more broadly, including collaborating with our allies and partners to invest in expanding capabilities in their countries.
Despite efforts to expand the supply chain, it is possible that not all SRM manufacturers seeking to enter the market will succeed.
"I think the supplier base is for three or four large companies," Perry said. "If everyone were working at full capacity today, that's where the potential problems would arise. But not everyone will be working at full capacity."
Both Congress and the Department of Defense are optimistic about funding efforts to strengthen and diversify the SRM supply chain, but the exact extent of the Pentagon's assistance to industry, as well as its success in developing new second- and third-tier suppliers, remains unclear.
The 2025 budget reconciliation bill approved by lawmakers included $200 million for the solid rocket motor industrial base, another $400 million specifically for start-up solid rocket motor manufacturers and their supply chain, $42 million to establish a second source of large-diameter solid rocket motors for hypersonic missiles, and $100 million to develop a second source of solid rocket motors for Navy surface-to-air and anti-ship missiles.
The Ministry of Defense did not respond to detailed questions about its investments in the solid rocket motor supply chain, including how it plans to spend funds allocated under the dispute settlement program. However, some details about its previous investments were disclosed in the contracts awarded.
The Department of Defense announced $73 million in contracts through the end of fiscal year 2025 to help expand the Special Mission Launch Vehicle (SRM) supplier base, awarding funds to five suppliers. $25 million went toward the production of 3D-printed engine case prototypes, and over $12 million went toward testing the feasibility of converting rayon fabric into a material used for insulating rocket nozzles.
In late December, the Pentagon announced the allocation of nearly $33 million more for air-to-air missile contracts, including funds to increase production of casings and nozzles. (All of these contracts were funded by the Defense Production Act, which expired on October 1 but was reauthorized by Congress in December as part of the National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2026.)
The department has also invested in emerging special-mission jet engine makers themselves, awarding $14 million to Anduril in January to modernize its Mississippi manufacturing facility and $14 billion to X-Bow Systems in 2025 to prototype and test the GMLRS rocket engine, among other deals.
But for Helicon Chemical's Sarnicki, who is still waiting for the funding needed to ramp up production, the Defense Department's stated intention to speed up the process and address vulnerabilities in the SRM supplier base doesn't match the reality facing smaller suppliers like his own company.
"We're a small company at the very bottom of the food chain, and we're just trying to pay the bills and move forward," Sarnitsky said. "Things can be better at the very top. You'll read articles about Raytheon getting a huge weapons contract, or Northrop getting one. Everything seems great. But you have to know how to produce it."
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