On Sept 18 last year, Rep Jay Obernolte (R-Calif.) posted on X that he and Rep. Ken Calvert (R-Calif.), the chairman of the House Appropriations Committee’s defense panel, had recently visited Exquadrum, a small business in Victorville in Obernolte’s district.
“Exquadrum has developed systems and technologies such as leading-edge hypersonic solid-fuel rockets and the testing of rocket engines that will soon land on the moon,” Obernolte wrote on X. “Innovations like those produced at Exquadrum are critical to ensuring America remains on the cutting edge of technology.”
Founded in 2002 by Kevin Mahaffy and Eric Schmidt, who had worked for a decade at the Air Force Rocket Propulsion Laboratory, Exquadrum has received dozens of contracts for “rocket propulsion, controllable solid rockets, Divert and Attitude Control Systems, counter weapons of mass destruction munitions, and technical services,” the company says on its website.
Mahaffy’s last job at the Air Force Rocket Propulsion Lab before founding Exquadrum was chief of the solid rocket motors branch, and Schmidt “developed liquid rocket technology and led the refurbishment and buildup of the large rocket test stands that once tested the engines for the mighty Saturn V moon rocket,” Exquadrum said.
Obernolte has proposed a “sense of Congress” Floor amendment to the House version of the fiscal 2025 defense authorization bill that the secretary of the Air Force “should pursue efforts to research, develop, and demonstrate advanced propellant mixing technologies for solid rocket motor propulsion systems that can be inserted into current or planned production facilities in order to provide additional surge capabilities to meet near-term supply needs.”
“Domestic production capabilities for solid rocket motors have inherent limitations due to the mixing technology that is currently in use, a technology that hasn’t changed for over 60 years, for which there is a single supplier, and which is particularly vulnerable to foreign object debris,” the amendment says. “New, efficient, and ecologically friendly solid rocket motor mixing technologies have the potential to assist in ramping-up tactical missile production in anticipation of increased global instability.”
The U.S. has used ammonium perchlorate (AP), an inorganic oxidizer, as a key ingredient for solid rocket propellant. A May 4, 1988 fire at American Pacific‘s Pacific Engineering and Production Company (PEPCON) plant in Henderson, Nev., caused significant damage in a 10-mile area and led to the shuttering of the plant and American Pacific moving the operation to Cedar City, Utah.
PEPCON had provided AP for the boosters for the Space Shuttle, then grounded in the wake of the Jan. 28, 1986 Challenger disaster.
The AE Industrial Partners private equity firm bought American Pacific in 2020 from the family investment arm of the late Jon Huntsman, Sr., a billionaire philanthropist who built his fortune making plastics and chemicals. The Huntsmans had bought American Pacific from Miami-based H.I.G. Capital in 2015.
American Pacific has been the only U.S. supplier of AP, but Northrop Grumman [NOC] has had work to make the chemical in Promontory, Utah, including as part of U.S. Navy research and development. The company has sought vertical integration in its solid rocket engine business–inherited from the buy of Orbital ATK in 2018–to lessen material costs.
AP use in solid rocket propellant is the legacy of an Air Corps Jet Propulsion Project (ACJP) collaboration, begun in December 1942, between the Guggenheim Aeronautics Laboratory at the California Institute of Technology and the Western Electrochemical Company Inc. (WECCO) in Henderson, Nev., to research the use of perchlorates for jet-assisted takeoff. WECCO opened a small AP plant in Henderson in 1947, and WECCO veterans went on to found PEPCON and its parent, American Pacific, in 1955.
“Late in the 1960s it appeared that demand for AP had peaked and would probably hold steady except in time of national emergencies,” Joseph Schumacher, a WECCO co-founder, wrote in a report in 1999. “Then the Space Shuttle came along and changed the outlook again.”
The solid rocket propellant for the Space Shuttle contained about 70 percent AP, and SpaceX‘s Falcon rockets contain AP.
DoD uses AP Grade 1 for a number of weapons, including the U.S. Air Force Minuteman III ICBM, the Army’s Guided Multiple Launch Rocket System, and the U.S. Navy’s Standard Missile and Trident II D5 Missiles.
To aid Ukraine and deter China, the Pentagon and the White House, through Biden’s 2021 Executive Order 14017–“America’s Supply Chains,” have been putting more emphasis on ramping up missiles/munitions production and related research and development. The Air Force Research Laboratory (AFRL) said that DoD budget requests for such efforts tripled from $9 billion in fiscal 2015 to $30.6 billion in fiscal 2024.
Exquadrum, for its part, has proposed a centrifugal solid rocket propellant mixing technology that could drastically reduce DoD’s need for AP.
“Exquadrum’s proposed centrifugal solid rocket propellant mixer technology could potentially provide increased solid rocket motor production capacity and productivity at an affordable cost,” Shawn Phillips, the chief of AFRL’s rocket propulsion division at Edwards AFB, Calif., wrote Exquadrum CEO Mahaffy in a March 5 letter. “The technology also has potential for dual-use in non-defense commercial industries such as the United States pharmaceutical sector. AFRL would like to stay appraised of Exquadrum’s efforts to develop centrifugal solid rocket propellant mixer technology to meet the needs of national defense.”