Ursa Major wins, matches $12.5M investment from DoD to improve solid rocket motor production

WASHINGTON — Ursa Major, a Colorado-based privately funded defense contractor, announced today it will match a $12.5 million investment from the Pentagon to begin work on maturing its solid rocket motor manufacturing process.

The initial Defense Department investment stems from the Office of Strategic Capital, a Pentagon office focused on strengthening critical supply chain technologies, and the work will be done in conjunction with the US Navy’s Program Executive Office for Integrated Warfare Systems. Breaking Defense sought a comment from the Navy, which deferred to the Office of Strategic Capital. A spokesperson for OSC did not respond to a request for comment by press time.

“We are proud to work with OSC on their mandate for expanding the defense industrial base by bringing new innovations into the DoD ecosystem,” Dan Jablonsky, Ursa Major CEO, said in a company statement. “Ursa Major is revolutionizing manufacturing approaches used in propulsion development in the United States, building flexibility of production and scalability into manufacturing for our defense customers.”

The work, which was initially awarded in July, will focus on propellant manufacturing, additive manufacturing and composite case winding, the statement added. Separately, Ursa Major announced in April it was working with the Navy to apply its manufacturing process for the Mk104 Dual Thrust Rocket Motor, which is used on the service’s SM-2, SM-3 and SM-6 missiles.

The announcement comes as numerous defense tech companies are all eyeing the solid rocket motor industry. Breaking Defense previously reported that Lockheed Martin and General Dynamics struck a deal to partner on the technology, Anduril made acquisitions to enter the space, and Northrop Grumman launched an innovation campaign around SRMs.

It’s also among the first big public pushes by the Office of Strategic Capital, a relatively new office introduced by Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin during the 2022 Reagan National Defense Forum and aimed specifically at infusing private capital into defense tech startups.

“Our partners in the private sector have flagged a consistent problem,” Austin said at the time. “Even when they can see a way to deliver a promising technology to a military customer, securing the necessary capital to scale is hard — and sometimes impossible. So we’ve listened, and we’ve acted.”