Latest news with #Aerojet
Yahoo
22-05-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
L3Harris breaks ground on new rocket motor plant in Virginia
CULPEPER, Va. — L3Harris has begun clearing forest and carving out roads deep in the Virginia countryside, breaking ground on a major expansion at its Orange County facility to produce small and medium solid rocket motors – key components for the Javelin antitank weapon. As part of the Defense Production Act used to boost the replenishment of weapons sent to Ukraine, L3Harris' Aerojet Rocketdyne is building state-of-the art facilities for solid rocket motor production, such as casting and assembly, and for mixing and grinding operations while upgrading its testing plant. The U.S. has sent Ukraine over 10,000 shoulder-fired Javelin systems since Russia invaded in February 2022 and is now working to replenish its depleted stock. Javelin is a joint venture between Lockheed Martin and Raytheon. Aerojet Rocketdyne supplies the rocket motors for the weapon. Lockheed Martin aims to boost annual production from 2,400 Javelin missiles to nearly 4,000 by 2026, and Aerojet will need to contribute to meet the demand. Aerojet is constructing five new buildings that will move all work it does to build small and medium rocket motors, primarily Javelin, from Camden, Arkansas, to Orange county. It is primarily funded using a portion of the $215 million in Defense Production Act funding the company received for capacity ramp up efforts. The aim is to complete construction in the third or fourth quarter of 2026 and then begin moving into production in early 2027, Scott Alexander, L3Harris' missile solutions president, told reporters. The company has been tucked in the Shenandoah hills for 30 years, making a number of rocket motors for major programs including the Standard Missile, the Trident II D5 and the jettison motor for NASA's Artemis program. The area is also home to its center of excellence for propellant research and SRM production and has a robust testing facility that includes work on ramjet and scramjet technology development. L3Harris has also broken ground on new facilities in Camden, Arkansas, including a 60,000 square foot setup to concentrate on ramping up production of the rocket motors used in the Guided Multiple Launch Rocket System that is fired from the Army's High Mobility Artillery Rocket System, another critical weapon sent to Ukraine to help it beat back the Russian invasion. And it is shifting all of its inert components like motor cases to Huntsville, Alabama. Overall, the company has doubled its internal investment in Aerojet's SRM production since acquiring it in 2023, Alexander said. The new buildings will leverage 'a lot of automation, robotics,' Julie Wikete, Aerojet's Orange site director, told reporters May 21 at the facility. 'How do we improve the overall experience here? And especially with building these new, we're able to leverage a lot of that more future factory approach that's going to lend ourselves directly to increasing the overall output of Javelin.' The new facilities will allow the company to increase its overall production capacity for Javelin solid rocket motors by 20% through strategic building and production line designs that cut the distance traveled across the facility during various stages of the process by 90%, Wikete said. 'We are reducing the overall time to build, which just immediately translates to faster out the door,' she noted. The expansion represents significant growth, although the number of new employees that will be needed at the facility is still being evaluated. 'We're always hiring,' Wikete said. 'Javelin is one program that is coming here … we are also growing in other areas,' she said. 'We'll continue to evaluate that as programs come online and more and more jobs will be opened up at that point.' With the addition of new production practices like robotics and automation that will enhance the process, the benefits include 'statistical reliability in what you're building and how you're building,' Alexander said. 'You take a lot of the human factor out of that, but also it is more efficient and so ultimately that is going to affect the cost per round in terms of it being economical.'
Yahoo
16-04-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
Aerojet's president talks new approach to making rocket motors
Aerojet Rocketdyne supplies one of the most critical parts of a munition — solid rocket motors — and since L3Harris acquired the company roughly two years ago its goal has been to ramp up production to meet the skyrocketing demand for tactical and strategic missiles. As part of that quest, Aerojet broke ground earlier this year to build four new solid rocket motor production facilities at its campus in Camden, Arkansas. Defense News sat down earlier this month with the dual-hatted Ken Bedingfield, who is both L3Harris' chief financial officer and Aerojet Rocketdyne's president, to discuss the rapidly expanding solid rocket motor industry and how the company is looking to innovate by changing the way it manufactures and partners to deliver capability. This conversation has been edited for length and clarity. With the demand of solid rocket motors being as high as they are, where do you think the company will go in terms of building capacity in the next five years? It's been almost two years since we acquired Aerojet Rocketdyne, and there was a set of delinquent deliveries that existed at the time of the acquisition. We have done a lot of work to burn that down. And we burned that down probably to the tune of about 60% of what was late or delinquent at the time of acquisition. Which programs were most behind? It was certainly multiple, but we've done a great job of really driving that down and we continue to be focused on that. And increasing our capacity to make deliveries for tactical motors; whether that's Stinger, Javelin, GMLRS [Guided Multiple Launch Rocket System missiles]. We've about doubled our investment in [capital expenditures] to be able to increase capacity in existing facilities in Camden and then we are investing, along with the U.S. government around the Defense Procurement Act funding that we received to put a new facility online … largely for Stinger, Javelin and GMLRS, specifically to that new facility. We will continue to focus a significant amount of our effort on tactical motors for the next three to five years in driving that capacity up. We certainly always continue to invest in R&D [research and development], and so if there are needs for focus on a different motor, if you talk about multiple launches, that would likely be a smaller motor, we could certainly, pretty quickly, surge where we have capacity to address things like that. We're certainly focused on affordability, and how we can deliver as much capability for the lowest cost possible. I think we're trying to get to that through, certainly the capital side of things, repeatability, robotics, automation, and then from a design perspective: What are the materials in the propellants? How do you burn the propellants? How do you get range out of the amount of mass that you have? It's a pretty diverse portfolio. And there's a lot of programs and products in there, so there will likely always be some level of delinquencies as you focus your resources on what's critical at the moment. But I think we would largely, will get to more of a steady state, probably end of 2025, where we're really able to focus on driving the capacity improvements and really seeing some of the results of the investments that we've been making in capacity, and, again, continuing to burn down those delinquencies, while also addressing the amount of demand that we see from customers. Expand on the adoption of robotics and automation you're putting into your facilities, and what does that mean for different workers involved in production? We are hiring in Camden and Huntsville. We still need people, just what they are doing will be different. And I would say, as we move forward, there is more science, maybe, and less art to how you produce a motor, and so that's some of the automation, whether it's robotic application of materials to the inside of a motor, whether it's robotic application of materials on the outside. How do you actually do the pouring and casting of the propellant itself? So we are automating those types of processes to make sure that you get the right quality because the tolerances here are pretty tight, pretty specific in how you do this and so it reduces the risk of needing rework and things like that. What would labor then be focusing on in terms of other parts of the production process? It might be quality, certainly. Predictive data is another one. I think that there's opportunity to have labor doing some aspects of that, but mostly it's where there's repeatable and high-volume process. It's pulling the labor out of there and moving it into kind of less repeatable, lower volume areas, potentially moving from production to R&D, as an example. How much more quickly can you produce solid rocket motors for your major programs? We can absolutely accelerate the rate at which we produce solid rocket motors. … Some of it comes down to how quickly can we get on contract. And it takes, unfortunately, longer than you would like, or longer than you would expect, to get on contract to deliver some of these motors. And then, working with the supply chain, there's some long lead items in there that mean that we can't deliver until we get some of those parts. We have to be able to turn our suppliers on. And there's a limited number of suppliers that are doing cases and nozzles and some of these other components of the product. So we've been making some investments in the supply base and the suppliers, providing them with some capital, with some equipment, things like that, and trying to, therefore, shorten that time. … We work with our customers to get funding for some of the long lead requirements, to keep those lines hot so that as capacity is needed, we can move there as quickly as possible. How are you driving flexibility into your manufacturing process to deal with any future ebb and flow in demand? Obviously demand is high now, but we can't predict the future. As we look at some of the investments we're making, we're trying to think about how those are more, I hate to use the word, flexible, but, I'll just say able to be used across multiple products and programs, so less program centric, and more maybe one week you're doing work for Javelin or another kind of smaller motor and the next week you're able to be mixing and casting for a different motor. That's one of the things that we've asked the team to really think about. It is tough because if you look at a solid rocket motor facility, because you're dealing with explosives, it's got to be dispersed. And because it's dispersed, you tend to disperse it by product or by program. So you'll drive around a facility, you'll say, 'There's a [Patriot Advanced Capability]-3 building. There's a SRM building, Standard Missile 2, Standard Missile 2 1B, or Standard Missile 3,' … and now we're trying to say, 'There's a mix and cast building,' and then you get that to where it needs to be, then integrate in the next product We're calling it kind of the factory of the future for solid rocket motors to rethink how do we do it. And I think it's a good time for it, because, as I mentioned, we've doubled our [capital expenditures] in two years since we acquired the business, and as we work with the U.S. government to integrate the DPA, along with our capital, it really gives us an opportunity to while we very much focus on meeting the letter of the law of what the DPA was for — and that was three specific programs — making sure that we are really thinking about how we are able to surge as demand changes over time. Are you seeing opportunities to partner with nontraditional companies or ones just coming on line working on various aspects of this industry? We are. We consider ourselves to be the trusted disruptor in the defense industry. We think we are a little more agile than some of the traditional primes, and therefore, we think we're a good partner to be able to move fast and work with some of the new entrants, and that's where we think some of the discussions will ultimately lead. How is L3Harris approaching President Trump's executive order to establish a missile defense shield of the homeland he is calling Golden Dome? Have you responded to the Missile Defense Agency's requests for information? I think there were eight RFIs [requests for information] that came out from MDA, and then another agency had a set of RFIs that they asked for responses on. We've responded to all of those. We are excited about Golden Dome. We think it's an important capability to keeping the homeland safe and we think we've got a lot of technology and capability there, whether it's space-based missile warning, missile tracking and capabilities around interceptors. You may have seen we, as Aerojet Rocketdyne, have been successful in finding positions on various interceptor programs, whether that's propulsion or divert and attitude control. We do a lot of ballistic missile targets. … And you may have seen recently, I think they called it FT-X 40, was a test that was run, and we had largely provided the capability for that. It was the first ballistic missile test to use a new motor that we had developed. And it also tested some, let's just say, hypersonic capability that L3 Harris has some interest in or some capability around.
