Propulsion technology startup Ursa Major on Monday said it has received an engineering contract from the Navy to develop and test a new design for the legacy Mk 104 solid rocket motor (SRM) that powers the service’s family of ship-launched Standard Missiles with a goal to enter low-rate production in two to three years.
If successful, the development would be an important step in the Defense Department’s goal of expanding production capacity for SRMs, which power an array of ground, air, and sea-launched missiles. L3Harris Technologies [LHX] is the current supplier of the Mk 104, which it manufactures at its facilities in Camden, Ark., but the Navy wants multiple sources to bolster the supply chain to meet demand for increasing missile production.
The family of Standard Missiles, which includes the SM-2 for surface-to-air engagements, the SM-3 for ballistic missile defense, and the SM-6 for anti-air warfare, anti-surface warfare, and ballistic missile defense, are produced by RTX [RTX], which is also responsible for its supply chain. RTX’s venture capital unit is an investor in Ursa Major.
The requirement holder for the $4.3 million award is the Navy’s Program Executive Office Integrated Warfare Systems, which used the Naval Energetics Systems and Technologies (NEST) Program Other Transaction Authority, Dave Olson, director of the Customer Advocate Office at Naval Surface Warfare Center Indian Head Division, told Defense Daily in an email.
The Navy’s money builds on “millions of dollars” of internal investments nine-year-old Ursa Major has made that are “common across all of our systems,” which include SRMs and liquid rocket engines, Joe Laurienti, Ursa Major’s founder and CEO, told Defense Daily last Friday before the announcement. One of the company’s crown jewels for manufacturing is its Lynx system, a scalable, flexible additive manufacturing production cell that needs roughly 2,500 square feet of shop space and can 3D print SRM cases and other components.
The Navy contract is “intended to start to push us into production as quickly as possible,” he said during a virtual interview.
Laurienti said that a significant percentage of the Mk 104 it is designing will be additively manufactured and that “The entirely of the process is highly automated.” The energetics will not be additively manufactured, he said.
“A big part of our Lynx system philosophy is that by enabling a process that takes people out of the system, you drive up safety and you drive down cost,” he said.
Ursa Major’s manufacturing process is expected to have the benefit of delivering costs savings and a “performance advantage as well” versus legacy production systems, Laurienti said. However, “The priority on this program” is filling a “production shortfall,” he said.
The way the company envisions production is in terms of “thousands of motors across many systems,” with Lynx producing Mk 104s one day and a different motor the next, Laurienti said.
The NEST project title for the award is “Lynx: Designing MK 104 DTRM for Manufacturing and Reliability.” DTRM stands for dual thrust rocket motor.
This year the Colorado-based company will begin building Mk 104s and hot-fire testing prototypes, which will be designed to specification as opposed to building to print based on legacy designs. Building to specification allows Ursa Major to develop and produce the rocket motors its own way, as long as the overall design parameters can plug-in to the Standard Missile as the legacy motors do.
Firing motors and engines is something Ursa Major does every day, he said.
Ursa Major has already done much of the design and manufacturing development and the next two years will complete manufacturing development, develop the rest of the motor, and then conduct qualification testing, he said.
Even though the company is designing its version of a Mk 104, unlike with a new system, the fact that the motor is has been used for years means the qualification requirement is known, Laurienti said.