Anduril and Australia’s the Guided Weapons and Explosive Ordnance Enterprise (GWEO)
The Australian arm of American defense startup Anduril is hoping Canberra’s push for sovereign defense production capability and plans to buy large amounts of long-range precision munitions may help it win a contract to build a brand new solid rocket motor facility using advanced technology.
There’s a large pile of money to be tapped since Australia has committed up to $21 billion AUD ($14.1 billion USD) for what it’s calling the Guided Weapons and Explosive Ordnance Enterprise (GWEO) over the next decade, and rocket motors are a key part of that enterprise. There’s a wide array of platforms that Australia either owns or plans to buy, including Evolved Seasparrow (ESSM), the SM-2 (already in the inventory) and the SM-6 for the Navy, the Sidewinder (AIM-9X) and AAMRAM for the Air Force, and Norwegian Advanced Surface-to-Air Missile System (NASAMS), and two missiles that can be fired from HIMARS mobile launchers, Guided Multiple Launch Rocket System (GMLRS) and PRSM (Precision Strike Missiles) for the Army.
“Having a manufacturing complex in Australia will enable production of solid rocket motors for ourselves, firstly and then ultimately, from an export perspective, to our allies and partners around the world. And there is, at the moment, an inability to meet that demand,” David Goodrich, Anduril Australia’s CEO, told Breaking Defense.
Australia has a request for information out to industry for solid rocket motor production, so this competition is in the early stages.
The person behind Anduril’s solid rocket motor enterprise, Brielle Terry, has been here for a week-and-a-half, immersing herself in Australia’s unique military and procurement culture. She said the work the company has done in Mississippi setting up their first solid rocket motor plant should be replicable here.
“So we have shovels in the ground. We’ve got equipment that we’ve had several years on order, and designs, form, fit and function bespoke for our full-rate production capabilities. All that’s coming together,” she told Breaking Defense in an interview, referring to the Mississippi facility, an expansion of which was announced in June.
Anduril’s foray into solid rocket motor production in the Lucky Country joins Lockheed Martin Australia and Thales Australia, who signed a teaming agreement on Sept. 11 to pursue “development and production of solid rocket motors for the Australian market,” a joint statement said. The two companies plan to use the existing facilities for production of propellants and munitions at Mulwala in New South Wales and Benalla in Victoria. Thales manages the sites.
In an interesting tidbit in that joint statement, the companies say they want to build a plant here “that is globally competitive and may include the domestic manufacture of SRMs [solid rocket motors] ranging from simple rockets to large, complex strategic motors.”
Lockheed already has related business here, as its GMLRS will be built in Australia from 2025, which the Australian Defense Ministry says will be “an important first step towards establishing domestic missile manufacturing on a larger scale. It will facilitate the transfer of technical data from the United States, establish processes for engineering certification, and begin to build the technical skills of an Australian workforce.”
In addition to the team of Lockheed and Thales, NIOA, the Australian privately owned munitions company, is interested in moving into the SRM market, as is Northrop Grumman, the world’s largest maker of such motors. Northrop told Defense News recently they have been working for three years to get ready for entry into the market here.
Terry said Anduril hopes to lean on tech to push their facility ahead, pointing to the company’s Mississippi Solid Rocket Motor Complex as an example.
“So right now, if you look at what is being done in the industry, it’s a blast from the past of the 1950s and 1960s technology, which was state-of-the-art at that time. But as you know, with qualification of weapon systems, once you have a qualified system, it’s very hard to change the manufacturing line,” Terry said. “And unfortunately, that means that many of the practices that are found in the United States, as well as here in Mulwala and Benalla, are, you know, still baselined in those 1950s and 1960s technologies. But we’ve been really looking at automation, increases in quality and safety and keeping humans out of the loop in in very critical quality and and hazardous operations, and using robotics and automation in order to do those.”
The combination of building and expanding the new American plant and investing in long-lead items for a possible Australian factory means that “we feel like we’re in a very good place to basically copy and paste everything here that we’ve been doing in coastal Mississippi,” Terry added.
Terry and Goodrich said that the company’s tech should allow them to quickly scale up production for either the domestic or export markets when needed without having to expand the size of the facility because of improved efficiency. The smaller footprint of the more efficient plant means they could build in new locations, if the Australian federal and state governments approve. And the company has been scouting other sites than the existing pair, they said.
The final cherry on top of the Anduril pitch is a new solid rocket fuel in development, called ALITEC, which Terry claims will “bring the largest change in performance to the solid rocket motor industry that we’ve seen in our lifetimes since 1954 when the existing propellant was manufactured.”
The new fuel uses lessons learned from the automobile battery industry, uses an aluminum lithium alloy and could boost GMLRS’ range by more than 40 percent, she said. The fuel is not ready for use yet, but Terry said “we’re looking for a fieldable solution next calendar year.” The Australian plant could produce both existing fuel and ALITEC.
This article was published by Breaking Defense on October 11, 2024.