| ISSUE 039 · MATERIALS, CAPACITY, CONVERSION | |
| Everyone is counting solid rocket motors. Northrop Grumman has invested more than $1 billion across its SRM facilities, per a company statement to Breaking Defense in January 2026. The One Big Beautiful Bill Act, signed in July 2025, included $400 million for the emerging solid rocket motor industrial base alone. Now name the company that makes the oxidizer inside every one of those motors. | |
| Ammonium perchlorate is the oxygen source in composite solid propellant. It goes into the motors that power the Javelin, PAC-3, THAAD, Standard Missile, GMLRS, and the Minuteman III strategic deterrent. It fuels the twin boosters on NASA’s Space Launch System. One chemical, across nearly every solid-fueled weapon and launch vehicle in the US inventory. | |
| One company produces it domestically. American Pacific Corporation, in Cedar City, Utah, is the only DoD-approved domestic supplier of ammonium perchlorate, per a 2020 Department of Defense Inspector General audit (DODIG-2020-095). Defense analytics firm Govini called AMPAC a “single point of failure” in the missile supply chain in an August 2025 report cited by Breaking Defense. | |
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| PLATE · RARE EARTH PROCESSING, CHINA, CIRCA 2010 |
| In September 2010, following a maritime dispute near the Senkaku Islands, China informally restricted rare earth exports to Japan. At the time, China produced approximately 97 percent of the world’s rare earth supply, according to a November 2010 U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission backgrounder. A decade of cost-driven procurement had funneled an entire industrial input through one country, and it took a single disruption to make that visible. |
| Japan’s response was substantial and still took years. In March 2011, trading house Sojitz and the state-backed Japan Oil, Gas and Metals National Corporation invested US$250 million in Lynas Rare Earths, the Australian miner, to develop an alternative processing chain. The WTO ruled against China’s export quotas in 2014. China dropped them in 2015. |
| The structural lesson is qualification time. Alternative rare earth deposits existed across the globe. Integrated separation and processing plants took years to build, requiring construction, environmental permitting, and customer qualification at each step. The gap between identifying a concentration and commissioning a physical alternative was measured in years, even with capital and political urgency behind it. |
| PLATE · AMMONIUM PERCHLORATE PRODUCTION, CEDAR CITY, UTAH | |||
| On April 15, 2025, AMPAC’s board approved a capital investment of up to $100 million to expand ammonium perchlorate production at Cedar City, per a NewMarket Corporation press release. Groundbreaking took place in September 2025. The expansion adds a third production line, projected to increase capacity by more than 50 percent, per Utah Business in June 2025. | |||
| NewMarket Corporation, AMPAC’s Richmond, Virginia parent, acquired the business in January 2024 for approximately $697 million, per SEC filings. The Utah Governor’s Office of Economic Opportunity awarded AMPAC a post-performance tax reduction in September 2025, tied to 26 projected new jobs over eight years. | |||
| AMPAC’s predecessor, Pacific Engineering and Production Company of Nevada, was founded in Henderson, Nevada in 1955. On May 4, 1988, a fire and explosions destroyed the Henderson plant, killing two workers and causing an estimated $100 million in damage. The Cedar City replacement facility began production in August 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. |
