Ursa Major, which is developing liquid engines for launch vehicles, in-space propulsion, and hypersonic weapons, on Monday introduced an additive manufacturing solution for producing solid rocket motors (SRMs) at scale and more affordably than legacy processes and is also developing its own SRMs to strengthen the defense industrial base for munition and missile propulsion.
Lynx is Ursa Major’s answer to legacy, inflexible production lines for SRMs, offering customers an affordable, adaptable, scalable additive manufacturing system that with one click can switch between castings. Lynx uses the company’s metallic additive manufacturing and automated composites manufacturing.
One Lynx production cell, which needs between about 1,500 and 2,000 square feet of shop space, can 3D print about 1,640 motor casings per year for man-portable missile systems such as the Javelin anti-tank system. The current surge production rate for Javelin is about 2,100 annually, the company said.
A Lynx 3D printing machine could produce the components necessary to build the motors for 260 Guided Multiple Launch Rocket Systems (GMLRS) annually, the company said.
Depending on the demand for a particular missile, “you could copy and paste a Lynx cell” to increase the rocket motors for a weapon, Joe Laurienti, founder and CEO of Ursa Major, told Defense Daily
on Nov. 17 ahead of his company’s announcement. “So, it’s extremely modular.”
A Defense Department “partner” two years ago suggested to the company it get into the SRM business, seeing that this area of the supply chain would be a bottleneck within the defense industrial base for a specific program, Laurienti said. The initial answer was “no,” because the company did not want to “just jump into a new technology,” he said.
Still, Laurienti and his team mulled the idea and examined what it could bring to bear for the SRM space while continuing develop its liquid propulsion technology.
“The first thought we had was what is really needed here is flexibility,” he said. “It’s negating the need to stand up a 40-year-old factor to backfill a system that we may or may not need in two years. So, obviously our background in 3D printing, materials development, automated manufacturing is perfect for that because we can work on one system one day and a very different system the next day and the factory doesn’t mind. There are no switching costs.”
Ursa Major’s approach to additive manufacturing can produce SRMs between 2 inches and 22.5 inches in diameter, covering common missile systems ranging from Javelin and the man-portable Stinger anti-aircraft missile to GMLRS and advanced air defense systems.
“We’re excited about that range, because there are a lot of systems that fit in there,” Laurienti said.” I think everything we’ve mentioned today—Stinger, Javelin, smaller munitions, Patriot, AMRAAM—all that fits in that size range.”
Laurienti also said that Ursa Major’s process can work with any propellants, whether government or industry-produced, so that the company can partner with anyone. Ursa Major will produce some of its own energetics and is currently doing so at “prototype scale,” he said.
Lynx is already building motors and by the end of 2024 Ursa Major expects to demonstrate low-rate production, he said.
The company also expects to announces its first SRM product later this year or early next year and at least another motor product in 2024, Laurienti said. The first product is still in development and prototyping and the forthcoming announcement will be a status “snapshot” of “hardware testing and design around the qualification system,” he said.
Ursa Major is a Colorado-based startup that has between 220 and 230 employees. The company is developing several liquid rocket engines for small and medium launch vehicles, hypersonics, missile defense, and in-space propulsion, and is designing an engine for medium and heavy launches.
Currently, the primary suppliers of SRMs are L3Harris Technologies [LHX] and Northrop Grumman [NOC]. X-Bow Systems, another small startup, is also developing large-diameter SRMs for hypersonic missiles. And Anduril Technologies, through its acquisition in June of Adranos, is also in the SRM business.