We told you that things were speeding up. Late last week, energetics company Firehawk Aerospace announced that they’ve secured a $4.9M contract with the US Air Force to help accelerate the development of next-gen hybrid rocket engines for strategic and tactical missiles.
Firehawk CEO Will Edwards told Tectonic that the company will work with AFRL to test their 3D-printed propellant and hybrid rocket motor, ultimately building towards a 10,000-pound thrust motor. The company also announced on Thursday that it’s investing $22M to build a large-scale production facility in Oklahoma, which they expect to produce a million pounds of propellant a year.
Fuel of the future: Rocket motor propellant is typically really expensive and really time-intensive to produce. Firehawk has taken that and turned it on its head: They use 3D printing to produce solid rocket propellant.
- The 3D printing takes production time down from weeks to hours.
- The company uses a hybrid propulsion architecture combining solid propellant (a 3D-printed grain) with liquid or gaseous fuel. These systems are—typically—reusable and more efficient than their traditional counterparts. They’re also pretty safe.
- Firehawk also employs a “mobile manufacturing approach,” according to the company, where they can set up mini manufacturing facilities and churn out propellant pretty much anywhere it’s needed.
- The company signed a strategic partnership with Raytheon (RTX) in 2022 to integrate the hybrid rocket propulsion setup into future missile systems.
- Firehawk closed a $60M Series C back in January, bringing its valuation to $290M, according to Pitchbook data.
The company’s bread and butter is quick-to-produce, efficient propellant, but ultimately, Edwards said, their goal is to be the go-to supplier for everything that propellant powers: motors and, one day, the missiles themselves.
Firehawk says they’ve already carried out 58 hot fire tests for both hybrid and solid rocket motors, as well as one hybrid flight test.
At sea: We asked Edwards one of our favorite questions: if the solid propellant is so much more efficient and quick to produce, why isn’t everyone 3D printing it? He said it comes down to inertia.
“The [big primes] have unbelievable engineers with a lot of legacy knowledge, tribal knowledge, and billions of dollars of infrastructure set up to do things one way,” he said, “It’s kind of hard to turn such a big battleship and start going another direction.”
Firehawk is like the new kid on the block, he said. They’ve got a small team laser-focused on one thing: making better rocket propellant. And that means they’ve been able to shake things up. “We didn’t have an entire naval aircraft carrier that we had to turn left,” Edwards said, “We were just [floating] around in a dinghy.”
Build up: Edwards said that they expect to break ground on the 320-acre Oklahoma facility this year and that it should be able to produce 1,000 pounds of propellant by end-2026.
Firehawk will continue producing out of its Dallas, TX headquarters and testing at two sites in West Texas. They are also expanding their Midland, TX test site by 18 acres.