Helicon Chemical Company, based in Orlando, is a small business trying to become a second supplier for HTPB-45M, a binding component that goes into most solid rocket motors (SRMs). But just as Helicon was planning to stand up production in West Virginia, budgetary turmoil slammed the brakes on a promised and much-needed $15 million contract from the Pentagon. The situation is aggravated by the ongoing lapse in the Small Business Innovation Research program, funds from which make up about one-third of Helicon’s budget, and could become even worse if the government shuts down for a second time on Jan. 30, company CEO Jack Sarnicki told Breaking Defense. “Everything has come to a screeching halt,” Sarnicki said. “If we don’t get under contract [for the West Virginia facility], and another government shutdown occurs, we could have real issues with my company. We would probably have to think about laying off people.”

As demand for munitions like the Army’s Guided Multiple Launch Rocket System and the Navy’s Standard Missile family has skyrocketed in recent years, so too has demand for the solid rocket motors that power them, prompting new entrants to dive into the market and traditional standbys to rapidly expand. But that growth hasn’t yet been replicated across the fragile SRM supply chain, several senior industry officials told Breaking Defense, raising questions about whether the scale exists to support the sector. “We don’t really need a third solid rocket motor provider. What I’ve been saying to everyone is they’ll just go to the same supply chain,” said L3Harris CEO Chris Kubasik in September at the Jefferies Industrials conference. “We need more companies that make nozzles. We need more companies that make igniters. We need more companies that make cases,” he said. “A third or a fourth solid rocket motor provider, they’re going to call the same people that we already have locked up, for our supply chain, and they’ll just have to get to the back of the line.”

What else is needed, according to defense software firm Govini CEO Tara Murphy Dougherty, is more aggressive input, in dollars and attention, from the Pentagon. “The Department leadership has a real opportunity right now, because as the reconciliation money becomes available, they’re about to spend upwards of $10 billion on additional munitions,” she said. But, “as of right now, they’re going to do things the exact same way and somehow expect different results from a supply chain management perspective.”

The ‘Ripple Effect’ Problem

According to Govini, between 1995 and 2017 the US industrial base for solid rocket motor makers shrank from six companies to just two providers: Orbital ATK, which was acquired by Northrop Grumman in 2018, and Aerojet Rocketdyne, which was acquired by L3Harris in 2023. A third company, Norwegian-based Nammo, produces solid rocket motors for certain US-made weaponry in Norway. However, in the last four years, a number of firms have announced plans to grow the SRM market in hopes of tapping into what appears on paper to be a wealth of funding from DoD for new munitions. Among the new entrants are defense startups Anduril, Ursa Major and X-Bow as well as legacy defense firms like General Dynamics. And both Northrop and L3Harris have announced their intention to increase their production rates. The problem is that just as the SRM primes shrunk over time, so did the supply chain, with many materials and components available only from one or two companies, or with long lead times. And any impact to those companies could cause ripples throughout the SRM production line. Potential chokepoints include ignition safety devices, nozzles, cases and insulation, and the fix isn’t necessarily one-size fits all, according to executives. But perhaps the biggest concern lies in the supply chain for energetics, the materials and chemicals that cause the propulsive reaction needed by SRMs.

In 2025, officials from Nammo discovered that a chemical company that produces an ingredient for propellant used in one of its solid rocket motors was going out of business, with no alternative supplier. “It’s caused kind of a ripple effect of, what do we do?” said Andy Davis, Nammo’s vice president of engineering and strategy. (Davis declined to share the name of the program or supplier, citing sensitivities.)

He pointed out that in the world of propellants, smaller manufacturers of specialty chemicals may quietly go out of business without their defense clients realizing until it’s too late to put in final orders. That sets up rocket makers for a long, and expensive process to requalify a new vendor. “One of the challenges you have that people don’t understand is a propellant formulation is made up of, say, 10 to 12 ingredients. Those ingredients are finely balanced and tailored to meet mechanical properties, burn rate properties,” he said. “So if you take, say, aluminum powder, and you’ve qualified a formulation with one aluminum powder and that manufacturer no longer supplies that aluminum, it’s not as simple as ‘I’m just going to go get another aluminum powder and put it in.’” In those cases, companies essentially have to go through the formula development process for that propellant all over again, Davis said. “I then have to requalify the propellant,” he said. “I then have to requalify, potentially, the rocket motor, and I have to potentially requalify the missile.”

And for the smaller suppliers that provide chemicals, budgetary chaos can have a massive impact on lead times. Helicon isn’t relying solely on the Defense Department for money for its new facility, and intends to raise $15 million in private funds to match the government’s investment, Sarnicki said. But even once money starts flowing, it will take anywhere from 18 months to two years for Helicon to qualify production and start producing HTPB-45M for its customers, he added. That means that every month of missed funding means another month before a second supplier of that chemical is available to SRM makers. Energetic parts and propellants can take a year to source, per Govini. Meanwhile, American Pacific Corporation (AMPAC) is the only US-based source of ammonium perchlorate — a key ingredient used to make solid rocket motor propellant — creating a “single point of failure” in the missile supply chain, Govini states. AMPAC, which in June announced a $100 million investment to boost ammonium perchlorate production, did not respond to a request for comment. “Beyond AMPAC, the DoD lacks a deeper understanding of the shared industrial base critical for solid rocket motor production,” Govini states. “A high degree of interconnectedness and shared sub-tier supply base suggests that expanding production of solid rocket motors will be difficult without increasing the number of suppliers for key parts and material.”

Both domestic SRM suppliers — Northrop and L3Harris — “are tethered to a handful of shared suppliers for essential components” and a disruption of any of those companies “whether a production delay, a quality control issue, or a catastrophic event like a factory fire — would simultaneously cripple the production capacity of the entire solid rocket motor enterprise,” per Govini. One such catastrophe sadly occurred in October, when an explosion at Accurate Energetic Systems’s facility in Tennessee killed 16 people, injuring others and leveling one building. The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives estimated that between 24,000 to 28,000 pounds of explosives detonated on the day of the incident, with the blast emanating from an area where the explosive chemicals were mixed and heated. According to an analysis done by Govini in October, Accurate Energetic Systems was a source of energetics for the solid rocket motor industry and was a sub-tier supplier to Aerojet Rocketdyne, Northrop and Nammo.

holy shit it’s literally the exact facility that the tweet I posted above was about

The incident should be a “wake up call” for the Pentagon to play a more proactive role in managing its supply chain, and ensure it has secondary, or even tertiary suppliers for critical materials, Govini’s Murphy Dougherty told Breaking Defense in an October interview. “We had actually seen this company pop in our data in terms of risk factors, and it related to the fact that there’s just a lack of redundancy for a lot of these components and parts in critical systems like solid rocket motors,” Murphy Dougherty said.