Common Modular Solid Rocket Motors are in Production at Ursa Major

Just over two years ago, Ursa Major set out to re-imagine how solid rocket motors are designed and produced so the United States can replenish critical all-domain missile stockpiles faster, at lower cost, and with high performance—solving the SRM shortfall. Today, that manufacturing approach is delivering a common modular product architecture.

The problem we set out to solve was clear. Legacy SRM manufacturing is slow, brittle, and optimized for single-product lines. The warfighter needs surge capacity and rapid replenishment, not another custom production cell. With Ursa Major’s additive-first, software-backed Lynx process and common production architecture, we’ve built a mixed-manufacturing system that treats SRM production as a repeatable, scalable product line. We deliver SRMs around core architectures with shared components, tooling, and software, that create commonality across the board so most platforms can be served by a standard, lower-cost motor family that still meets performance objectives.

“Today Ursa Major’s flexible manufacturing method is doing exactly what we promised for our customers: switching motor size, adjusting performance, and sustaining production without retooling an entire factory,” said Bill Murray, Vice President of Product & Operations, Solid Missile Systems. “That’s what realization looks like.”

In addition to full execution of our first-of-its-kind manufacturing process, we have:

• completed multiple independent audits, both from government and defense prime customers, that evaluated our energetics and manufacturing processes, providing validation of safety, quality, and scalability.
• increased sustained motor production rate to ~200 motors per year and maintained that cadence for several months, proving meaningful production capacity – and this is just the start.
• proved mixed-model production at scale and are actively manufacturing four different diameter motor sizes concurrently on the same production equipment, running different diameters and lengths through the same flow without line retooling.
• demonstrated operational agility in production. When a customer requested a change to a motor’s thrust profile mid-production, our team modified the design and restarted the line the same day — a capability that is practically impossible on traditional SRM production lines.
• established a Highly Loaded Grain testing pedigree with more than 30 HLG motor tests in the last 5 months, validating HLG as a practical solution to increase propellant mass and extend range without increasing motor size.
• sustained a regular test cadence of roughly four static fire tests per week, so designs can be refined faster and with confidence.

Ursa Major’s flexible manufacturing method is game-changing for replenishing the nation’s SRM inventory. Our common modular approach means we can scale quickly to meet demand across multiple customers and services and domains. In addition, using physics-based process qualification enables us to reduce program schedule and risk by eliminating the need for bespoke qualification for each motor variant, instead qualifying the production method.

Looking to the future, we’re preparing for the next set of milestones, including flight tests and ramped production. Ursa Major will continue partnering with the Pentagon, new and traditional primes, and our customers to deliver motors across a range of munitions while scaling production throughput and qualifying additional SRM variants.

What people often call ambitious, we call deliberate engineering. Ursa Major’s mixed-manufacturing approach was designed to make SRM production fast, flexible, and repeatable. We’ve proven those concepts in the factory and on the test stand with industrialized propellant production, concurrent mixed‑model manufacturing, sustained production rates, and a growing library of HLG test results. The core tenets of our common, modular and flexible manufacturing method have been demonstrated, and the results are real, American-made, and ready to deliver for the warfighter.

Fly Faster.