Damn. The Navy really is on quite the spending spree.
This morning, New Mexico-based solid rocket motor (among much else) company X-Bow Systems announced that it’s been awarded a prototype agreement with the Navy worth $69.7M to “develop and qualify a solid rocket motor booster for a key U.S. Navy next-generation weapon.”
An X-Bow spokesperson told Tectonic that the SRMs are for the Navy’s Modular Missile (NMM) program (that’s the service’s effort to build a family of missiles that share common components and an open architecture).
- Specifically, the company is building motors for the NMM QP-MR, the medium-range variant of the missile, designed to intercept things like cruise missiles, aircraft, and drones. The idea is that four of these bad boys can be packed into a single Mk 41 launch cell.
- Final products out of the NMM program are expected to come in a few different flavors, including a terminal-stage interceptor, as well as medium-range and long-range missiles.
“We must…break the decades-old bottleneck in solid rocket motor production,” X-Bow Founder and CEO Jason Hundley said in a statement. “This award is a clear signal the Pentagon is investing in advanced manufacturing to solve that problem, and we are ready to deliver the affordable, mass-producible propulsion our nation needs.”
Right on target: X-Bow should be a household name by this point in the defense tech world. The company—pronounced “crossbow,” for the uninitiated—was founded back in 2016 and set out to apply the modern-and-fun world of additive manufacturing to the very old-school world of building solid rocket motors.
- Initially, the company focused on mega motors (like 34.5-inch varieties) to power things like missiles, hypersonics, and space stuff.
- But in the past few years, they’ve expanded downwards—including to 21-inch Mk 104 and 13.5-inch Mk 72 motors used in the Navy’s Standard Missile family. This new NMM SRM is expected to be 10 inches.
- They’ve also pushed into the drone world with rocket-assisted take-off (RATO) kits—including SRMs and launchers—for drone giant Aevex.
- And they’re not just doing propulsion—the company has developed its very own low-cost interceptor (like, the whole thing). They inked an $11M contract to develop that with the Missile Defense Agency this summer.
Speedy quick: Per X-Bow, the Navy plans to field its NMM capability in early 2031—that’s pretty quick, at least by Navy standards.
- The big idea is to eventually replace the service’s current Standard Missile family—SM-2, SM-3, and SM-6—with this more modular family.
- In an ideal world, the goal of the program is to build one standard interceptor that could be outfitted with different propulsion systems and tech based on how far you need it to go.
- And by sharing components across the family, the Navy hopes to make the missiles easier to produce at scale—and easier to upgrade as new propulsion, seekers, and other tech come online.
Step by step: Here’s how the X-Bow award will play out.
- Phase 1 of the prototype agreement is worth a cool $50.4M and will run for the next 12 months.
- That’ll then be followed by a $19.3M Phase 2 qualification option.
- The company says work will be carried out across California, New Mexico, and Texas.
- The contract will also enable X-Bow to stand up the tooling needed to eventually crank out as many as 500 of the motors a year at its Texas factory.
