| ISSUE 002 · MATERIALS, CAPACITY, CONVERSION | |
| Everyone is counting interceptors. Lockheed Martin said on 6 January 2026 that it had delivered 620 PAC-3 MSE interceptors during 2025, and announced a framework agreement with the Department of War to raise annual capacity from roughly 600 to about 2,000. Now name the cloth that lines the nozzle throat, and the mill that weaves it. You cannot, and neither can the people counting the rounds. | |
| Rayon is regenerated cellulose spun from wood pulp. It sits in tyre cord, in upholstery, in sausage casing. It also sits inside a solid rocket motor, where woven rayon fabric is impregnated with phenolic resin and carbonised into the ablative liner that lets the nozzle survive its own exhaust. A 2018 Defense Systems Information Analysis Center review put rayon based carbon fibre at 1 to 2 percent of all carbon fibre production. | |
| North American Rayon Corporation, at Elizabethton in Carter County, Tennessee, stopped making aerospace grade rayon in September 1997, and NASA held a stockpile sized to carry shuttle motor nozzle production to about 2005, according to a 2000 Marshall Space Flight Center and Thiokol screening paper. On 26 September 2025 the Department of War awarded $12.6 million under Title III of the Defense Production Act to develop a domestic process for converting woven rayon fabric into carbonized rayon phenolic. | |
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| PLATE · STOCKPILE PURCHASING, UNITED STATES, 1950–1953 |
| In the summer of 1950 the United States held a stockpile that existed largely on paper. CSIS records that the Munitions Board had assembled a list of 54 strategic material groups by that year, and that the National Defense Stockpile held materials valued at $1.6 billion. |
| Congress appropriated roughly $2.9 billion over six months for emergency stockpile purchases, and on 8 September 1950 the Defense Production Act became law. Shortages of copper, nickel, steel, aluminium and tungsten slowed weapons production anyway, and tungsten came back out of the stockpile while the stockpile was still being filled. The 1950 statute carried instruments the Strategic and Critical Materials Stock Piling Act of 1946 did not: loans, loan guarantees and purchase commitments, written to create productive capacity. |
| The 1946 Act bought material. The 1950 Act bought the ability to make it. An inventory falls at the rate it is consumed, and it cannot be refilled faster than a qualified line can run. Counting the drums tells you how long you have. |
| PLATE · AMERICARB, NIAGARA FALLS BOULEVARD, NEW YORK | |||
| Americarb Inc. sits at 6100 Niagara Falls Boulevard in Niagara Falls, New York. Family owned, making carbon, graphite and ceramic materials for vacuum furnaces, semiconductors and energy systems. On 26 September 2025 it took $12.6 million under Defense Production Act Title III to build a prototype process for carbonized rayon phenolic, and has since put a $29 million expansion to the Niagara County Industrial Development Agency: a new 50,000 square foot building and about 40 hires. | |||
| Daniel Broodo, the company’s chief technology officer, told Investigative Post in December 2025 that Americarb would backfill the Department of Defense stock of the specialised rayon material, which the Pentagon then supplies to the contractors that build the missiles. | |||
| The site is the former SGL Carbon world headquarters, and the furnaces run on low cost hydropower supplied in partnership with the New York Power Authority. The September award was one of six made to the solid rocket motor industrial base under the same consortium solicitation, worth $87.3 million together. | |||
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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. |
