Anduril Becomes Third US Supplier of Solid Rocket Motors

August 13, 2025

Anduril has officially opened a full rate solid rocket motor manufacturing facility in McHenry, Mississippi, where the company expects to produce up to 6,000 tactical motors per year in the near future.

If the battlefield in Ukraine is any indication, future wars will be fought in part through large expenditures of missiles over a sustained period of time. But for missile salvos to work, certain components are absolutely critical to mission success. Every launch of precision fires relies on Solid Rocket Motors (SRM) as the backbone, making them just as critical to defense readiness. There’s just one problem: we don’t produce nearly enough of them.

Striking a target on the battlefield is downstream of industrial excellence and throughput. This has been true for decades. During World War II, a shortage of ball bearings—a seemingly small and specialized part — crippled production of tanks, aircraft, and vehicles for both Axis and Allied powers. Victory must be engineered on the factory floor.

A fundamental part of our inability to produce SRMs at scale is that there is simply not a sufficiently sized supplier base. Until now, the capacity to manufacture this critical component in large quantities has effectively been a duopoly. Though iconic — and effective — weapon systems like HIMARS are in high demand, just a handful of suppliers can build the components required to field them. In wartime, we will burn through munitions far faster than they can be replaced. Without the building blocks of American firepower, nothing works. Troops wait. Deterrence fails.

Senior defense leaders consistently call for a revitalization of the Arsenal of Democracy. That effort must start with increasing SRM production. And that starts with us.

Made in Mississippi, Mobilized for the Modern Battlefield

With $75 million of our own capital, Anduril has officially opened a full rate SRM manufacturing facility in McHenry, Mississippi. We’re scaling quickly — the Mississippi Solid Rocket Motor Complex employed 40 employees in January 2024 and we’ve grown to more than 100 today. In just 18 months, we’ve gone from breaking ground to an operational solid rocket motor facility. We’ve already test-fired more than 700 motors since January 2024, a testament to the speed and momentum of this team. Our newly expanded site will allow us to grow annual production to 6,000 tactical motors by the end of 2026.

This new facility builds on the foundation of our original rocket motor factory, located on the same complex in McHenry. That site will remain focused on low-rate production and advanced R&D, serving as the innovation hub where we prototype new designs, test novel materials, and refine manufacturing processes before scaling them next door.

This growth is also supported by a recent Defense Production Act (DPA) investment, awarded by the Department of Defense to strengthen and expand the U.S. solid rocket motor industrial base. This public-private partnership is key to scaling quickly and sustainably, while also demonstrating that the Department of Defense recognizes the value of our innovative manufacturing.

We Build What We Fight With

In April, we reached a major milestone with two successful live fire tests for the U.S. Navy’s Standard Missile program — the same class of highly capable missiles that have intercepted Houthi-launched attacks on Navy ships in the Red Sea and Iranian missiles over the skies of the Middle East over the past year. The rapid and iterative design phase, which was completed in close collaboration with the Navy, positions Anduril to quickly transition to full scale production of this vital capability.

It’s not just the Navy that requires a new fleet of missiles for the future fight. In March, the Army selected Anduril to develop a new 4.75-inch SRM for its long-range artillery. In today’s battlespace, the side that fires larger quantities of munitions first — even from hundreds of miles away — usually wins. Our work on this motor will enable 30 guided rockets to launch from a single HIMARS pod, multiplying firepower without increasing footprint.

We’re gaining momentum: Saab recently selected Anduril Rocket Motor Systems to design and produce SRMs for its Ground Launched Small Diameter Bomb, cementing our position as a growing player in the global defense supply chain. It won’t stop there, either. We have our sights set on full rate production at the facility by 2026 and we’ve already taken several substantive steps to get there.

Built Different

Decades-old processes simply won’t cut it for the demands of modern warfare. The defense industrial base has not built a full-scale SRM production facility in roughly half a century. Many of the tooling and manufacturing processes in place across the industry are of 1950s vintage. We are getting the same suboptimal results in part because we are relying on the same suboptimal blueprint.

Traditional SRM manufacturing is slow and linear. Each step depends on the last, which leads to downtime, inefficiency, and underused equipment. Analog equipment is both dangerous and slow.

Building a factory from the ground up meant we could rethink how SRMs are made — and we did.

From first principles to the final ribbon cutting, we’ve considered what 21st-century technologies can add to production processes. We use digital analytics to track every step in the production chain of custody. Our automation and robotics improve safety by keeping human hands away from the riskiest tasks. And our bladeless high-speed mixer— the centerpiece of our operation and integral to how munition propellants are created — is the only one of its kind in the world. We have the right tools for this job.

Starting from scratch has allowed us to reconfigure the design process itself. Each workstation is dedicated to a single, repeatable task, ensuring consistency and quality at scale. We call this our “one-piece flow” manufacturing model. It allows multiple steps to happen in parallel to each other, dramatically reducing production time.

We’re also investing in performance. Our ALITEC aluminum-lithium alloy fuel formulation is engineered for increased range — up to 40 percent longer than legacy motors in the same form, fit, and function. With robotic mixing, modular design, and smart scheduling, we’re building the solid rocket motor factory of the future.

This article was written by Brielle Terry, VP, Anduril Rocket Motor Systems. It has been edited. For more information, visit www.anduril.com .

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