L3Harris opens rocket motor plant, already producing parts

HUNTSVILLE, Ala. – L3Harris Technologies’ Aerojet Rocketdyne officially opened a new and expansive rocket motor parts plant in Huntsville, Alabama, in a ceremony Monday, which marks another clear step in the defense industrial base’s work to drastically increase production capacity for munitions in the U.S.

With some machines already installed across the periphery of the vast, but still empty floorspace, the Advanced Manufacturing Facility – South (AMF-South) is poised to surge production of inert parts for solid rocket motors in a facility the size of six football fields (roughly 379,000 square feet). These parts include components like cases, nozzles, exit cones and aft closures.

Within 24 months of L3Harris acquiring Aerojet Rocketdyne, it invested over $20 million to bring the facility to life and additional funding from a Defense Production Act agreement helped pay for additional equipment and tooling.

The agreement between the company and the U.S. government is to increase rocket propulsion manufacturing capacity in the continental U.S. to keep pace with the rising global demand for tactical and strategic missile production.

The new facility has already begun to build parts for the Standard Missile, Guided Multiple Launch Rocket System and the Javelin antitank weapon and plans to expand to other programs requiring solid rocket motors in the future, Scott Alexander, L3Harris’ missile solutions president, said at the event. The plan is to continue to add capability to the floorspace as demand increases.

While the company has already hired 40 manufacturing employees, there is a plan to bring on another hundred in the coming years.

The new facility comes in addition to the company’s 136,00 square foot Advanced Manufacturing Facility in Northern, Huntsville, dubbed AMF-North. Opened in 2019, it covers the production of inert parts for larger solid rocket motors.

In addition to L3Harris’ Huntsville expansion, it is also rapidly building out large manufacturing facilities in Camden, Arkansas, and Orange County, Virginia., to cover the entire gamut of solid rocket motor production.

While AMF-North and AMF-South focus on inert parts, the company broke ground on a new production facility to make energetics for rocket motors in Camden, Arkansas, earlier this year, and construction is underway to build out production for small and medium motors — key components for the Javelin.

Across the board, L3Harris is redesigning how it produces solid rocket motors, driving into that design more flexibility and the ability to surge and produce at scale. The company is also working to introduce new methods to achieve a drastically higher production rate.

“We spend a lot of time talking about the mobilization of the [defense] industrial base. This is exactly what we need,” Maj. Gen. Frank Lozano, the Army’s program executive officer for missiles and space, said at the event.

“When you hear senior leaders across the nation talking about increasing capacity, increasing throughput, increasing missile and munition inventory levels; when you hear people talking about getting on a war footing, understanding the threats and the adversaries that we face on a daily basis; when we talk about all of these things, this is the manifestation of that outcome,” he said.