| ISSUE 003 · MATERIALS, CAPACITY, CONVERSION | |
| Everyone is counting solid rocket motors. Northrop Grumman told Breaking Defense in January 2026 that it has put more than $1 billion into its motor facilities and plans to double output within four years. Anduril, Ursa Major, X-Bow and General Dynamics have all announced entries into the same business. The oxidiser inside those motors comes from one plant in southern Utah. | |
| Ammonium perchlorate begins as sodium chloride, ordinary salt, and ends as a crystal that supplies the oxygen a propellant burns. American Pacific Corporation supplied the oxidiser in the two boosters that lifted the Space Launch System on 1 April 2026, and a 2020 Defense Department audit traced its grade 1 product into the Army’s GMLRS rockets, the Navy’s Standard Missile and the Trident II D5. | |
| That audit, published on 9 July 2020, found American Pacific to be the only DoD-approved domestic supplier of grade 1 ammonium perchlorate, and recorded that the Pentagon buys none of it directly, leaving the purchase to the motor subcontractors. An OSD spokesman told Janes in May 2023 that the number of approved sources had grown, and that Northrop Grumman Space Systems reached laboratory qualification in 2021. The analytics firm Govini, quoted by Breaking Defense in January 2026, still describes American Pacific as the only US-based source. | |
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| PLATE · MAIZE FERMENTED FOR ACETONE, BRITAIN 1915–1918 |
| Cordite was made by working guncotton and nitroglycerine together in acetone and pressing the gel through dies. British acetone came from heating wood without air, and the best wood for it grew in continental forests that closed to Britain when the war began. Britain could build cordite capacity faster than it could supply the solvent that capacity ran on. |
| Chaim Weizmann, a lecturer at Manchester, had a fermentation route using Clostridium acetobutylicum on maize, and Chemistry World puts the yield at roughly 12 tons of acetone from 100 tons of grain. The Admiralty made him honorary technical adviser on acetone supplies on 1 September 1915. Production on his process began in June 1916 at a requisitioned factory at King’s Lynn in Norfolk, and by 1917 it was approaching 3,000 tons a year at the Royal Navy Cordite Factory at Holton Heath in Dorset and at other sites. |
| Nine months ran between the appointment and the first production batch, and another year before output approached rate. The chemistry already existed in a laboratory before the war started. The time went into proving it at scale, inside a propellant specification that could not be changed to suit it. |
| PLATE · AMMONIUM PERCHLORATE PLANT, CEDAR CITY, UTAH | |||
| On 15 April 2025 the board of American Pacific Corporation approved a capital investment of up to $100 million for an additional ammonium perchlorate production line at Cedar City, Utah, raising capacity by more than 50 percent. NewMarket Corporation’s 10-Q for the quarter ended 30 June 2026 says the line is expected to come online towards the end of 2026. | |||
| Kris Griffith, the company’s president, told Utah Business in June 2026 that the new process buildings are exact replicas of the existing ones, down to identical equipment, controls and piping, so that material from the new train is “indistinguishable from what we produce today.” Particle morphology and surface chemistry govern how the crystal behaves once it is in a propellant. | |||
| American Pacific has one operating facility and about 170 full-time employees. The Cedar City site also makes Halotron BrX, a clean fire-extinguishing agent sold as a replacement for high ozone-depleting halons. Production of ammonium perchlorate in Iron County began in July 1989. | |||
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| Every supply figure carries a date and a source in the text. Not a footnote. In the sentence. | |||
| FREE. NO STOCK PICKS. NO PREDICTIONS. | |||
| Nothing here is investment advice. No company is named as an investment. |
