Everyone’s favorite neoprime is back—and this time with some explosive news (bada-bing!).
This morning, Anduril announced that it has received $43.7M in Defense Production Act Title III funding to expand solid rocket motor (SRM) production in the US. The company says the funding will be used to “increase the efficiency and resiliency of [Anduril’s SRM factory] through expanding test fire infrastructure for more complex motors, increasing storage capacity, and acquiring common production tooling in manufacturing-level quantities.”
Human words? Anduril is scaling up its capacity to build the things that make missiles and rockets go zoom, and the DoD is giving them cash money to do it.
The company received its first tranche of DoD funding for SRMs ($14.3M) in December 2024 and opened a full-rate SRM production facility in Mississippi back in August 2025.
Zoom and boom: In case you’ve been living under a rock, the US has a pretty major SRM problem. Production is dominated by two primes—L3Harris and Northrop Grumman—and they’ve struggled to keep up with demand.
- SRMs are needed in everything from HIMARS to Javelins, Stingers, AMRAAMs, and GMLRS.
- In 2024, major producer Aerojet Rocketdyne—purchased by L3Harris in 2023—reported it was thousands of rocket motors behind schedule. Now, production is up, but they’re still “digging out of the hole.”
- Last year, Raytheon said that the SRM shortage was still limiting missile production.
Everyone and their mom is investing in scaling up SRM production. After all, new-age missiles ain’t super effective if they can’t fly.
- Northrop says it plans to double output by next year. We’ll believe it when we see it.
- Lockheed Martin and General Dynamics are building out a big-boy facility in Arkansas.
- The DoD invested $32.7M to expand SRM in December (Anduril got a chunk of that).
- Smaller companies like X-Bow and Ursa Major are also working on SRMs.
Anduril threw its hat into the rocket motor ring when it acquired Adranos in 2023.
- Last March, the company was selected by the US Army to build a new, teeny-tiny 4.75‑inch SRM for long-range precision artillery like HIMARS.
- Last summer, the US Navy awarded Anduril a $19M contract to build SRMs for the Standard Missile-6 (SM-6) program, and Saab selected Anduril to provide SRMs for the Ground-Launched Small Diameter Bomb (GLSDB) program, which it runs jointly with Boeing.
- In December, Anduril announced that it would provide SRMs to Boeing for the U.S. Army’s Integrated Fires Protection Capability (IFPC) Increment 2 Second Interceptor competition.
- In today’s announcement, Anduril also said that it has “secured a full-rate production contract with a European ally for an operational tactical air defense system.”
- The company says that its Mississippi facility will be able to churn out 6,000 tactical motors annually by the end of the year.
And they’re not just building these motors for themselves (though that will help). Back when they launched the facility, Anduril President and CSO Christian Brose told Tectonic and other reporters that they were also aiming to build for the rest of the industry.
“We’re supporting multiple industry partners…that run the gamut of different weapons programs,” Brose said. “From the very beginning, we’ve embraced the merchant supplier identity…where we are obviously providing solid rocket motors to our own programs, but the preponderance of what we’re doing is actually supporting other teammates across the industrial base.”
Watch out, primes. Anduril seems pretty serious about this whole “beating them at their own game” thing.