Every missile, every rocket, every artillery round begins with energetics — and the West has nearly stopped making them. U.S. propellant production still runs on processes designed in the Second World War: cast-and-cure chemistry, sixty-day production cycles, and billion-dollar facilities that take a decade to permit and build. Meanwhile, modern conflicts consume munitions faster than the entire industrial base can replace them. The bottleneck in American deterrence is not the missile. It is the fuel inside it.
Start at the root: propellant.
Firehawk Aerospace 3D prints solid rocket propellant. Using thermoplastic binders and additive manufacturing, Firehawk collapses a sixty-day production process into roughly six hours — producing an energetic pellet feedstock that can be stored indefinitely and formed into motors on demand. From its purpose-built facility in Lawton, Oklahoma, and an expanding footprint in Mississippi, Firehawk is scaling toward becoming one of the largest producers of rocket propellant and artillery motors in the country — without the billion-dollar facility, and without the foreign choke points. An AFRL contract for breakthrough high-thrust propulsion and successful Army flight tests of Javelin- and Stinger-class solid rocket motors mark the path.
More Thoughts From the Team at BVVC:
“Munitions win wars, and magazines run dry. Every serious study of a Pacific contingency reaches the same conclusion: the United States expends its critical munitions inventory in days, and rebuilding it takes years. We have watched this play out in real conflicts, in real time. The constraint is not design talent or demand signal. It is the physical capacity to produce energetics at scale, and that capacity has been allowed to atrophy to a handful of aging facilities running processes our grandfathers would recognize.
This is the strategic blind spot of the West: we count missiles, but we do not count the days it takes to make their motors. Firehawk attacks the root of the problem. By reinventing how propellant itself is manufactured — printed, not cast; hours, not months; distributed, not centralized — they change the arithmetic of rearmament. This is not an incremental improvement to a legacy process. It is a different manufacturing physics.
We invest in Teams, never the founder alone, and this Team pairs deep energetics expertise with the manufacturing discipline to industrialize it. In the conflicts that will define this decade, the side that can replenish wins. Firehawk is how the United States and our allies stay in the fight.”
“When I first got started at Firehawk, I met my co-founder…it was 3D printing rocket fuel essentially out of his garage…We’ve cut probably I’d say about a sixty day process down to about six hours…The first products we’re making are artillery motors. We should be the biggest producer of artillery motors in the country by next year.”
– Will Edwards, CEO and Co-Founder