Well, X-Bow is on one heck of a go-zoom winning streak.
Yesterday—just a few short weeks after scoring a $69.7M contract with the US Navy to develop SRM boosters for the Modular Missile (NMM) program—the New Mexico-based propulsion and missile company announced that it’s been tapped by CoAspire to “develop and produce the ground-launched SRM booster motors for the U.S. Navy’s new Coalition Heterogeneous Affordable Offensive Strike (CHAOS) program.”
CoAspire, it’s worth noting, won a $70M OTA with the Navy to develop a ground-launched variant of its Rapidly Adaptable Affordable Cruise Missile-Extended Range (RAACM-ER) for the Coalition Heterogeneous Affordable Offensive Strike (CHAOS) program back in July.
Gosh darn. What’re they putting in the water out Albuquerque way?
Gone hunting: Now, if you read Tectonic, you know X-Bow. The company (pronounced “crossbow”) was founded in 2016 and (at least initially) set out to use additive manufacturing to upend the very staid world of rocket motor manufacturing.
They kicked things off with big ol’ motors for things like big ol’ missiles and hypersonics, but in recent years have doubled down on smaller, traditionally very bottlenecked SRMs. And that’s brought them some pretty major wins.
- Back in April, they inked a $12.2M deal with Aevex for rocket-assisted takeoff kits for drones (including SRMs and other components).
- Then, in July, they won a $11M development contract with the MDA to develop a lower-cost interceptor (like, sub-$750 K).
- And then, in October, there was that $69.7M ceiling NMM contract with the Navy.
The company also inked a deal with Leidos (similar-ish to this one with CoAspire) for booster motor development and production.
Aspirational lifestyle: CoAspire ain’t slouching either, to be fair.
- The company was actually founded back in 2013 as a defense services and consulting firm by Douglas J. Denneny, a former U.S. Navy F-14/F/A-18 weapon systems officer, TOPGUN instructor, and MBDA executive.
- The team has been bootstrapped since its founding (no VC money here), and started internal development of their flagship Rapidly Adaptable Affordable Cruise Missile (RACCM) in 2022-ish.
- And it proved pretty popular. CoAspire scored a development OTA with the Air Force to scale up RACCM in late 2025, then signed a framework agreement for mass production of the lower-cost munition with the service earlier this year.
Embrace the CHAOS: Then there’s the whole CHAOS thing. CoAspire kinda came out of left field to clinch that $70M OTA for the program with their RACCM-ER (the extended-range version of RACCM) back in July.
- CHAOS is kinda niche—it’s the Navy initiative to develop low-cost, ground-launched cruise missiles for allies and partners through the Foreign Military Sales (FMS) process. Pretty timely.
- The idea is to give partner nations an affordable long-range precision-strike capability—particularly against not-so-nice ships—while also expanding missile production in the US and reducing reliance on legacy platforms.
- CoAspire was the first publicly announced winner for the program. The Navy then awarded another $65M OTA to Zone5 for a maritime-strike variant of its AGM-188 Rusty Dagger in August.
- And the Navy is being kinda coy about the program—the service said (when CoAspire won the contract) that they planned to award “at least one more” contract. So there could be more coming down the pipe.
Blast off: Now, X-Bow didn’t disclose the terms of the deal (like, how much they’re getting for all of this), but their role here is pretty clear—the company’s SRMs will provide the initial burst of thrust needed to launch those RACCM-ER’s and get them up to speed before their main propulsion systems take over.
Seems important. Go zoom and boom, indeed.
