Solid Rocket Booster Market Analysis 2026

Key Takeaways

• The global solid rocket booster market was valued at approximately $7.04 billion in 2024, growing at 9.3% annually
• North America holds over 42% of global market share, led by Northrop Grumman and L3Harris
• New entrants like Anduril are breaking a decades-long duopoly, reshaping defense SRM supply chains

What a Solid Rocket Booster Actually Is

There’s a certain poetry in how simple the concept is, even if the engineering is anything but. A solid rocket booster is essentially a large, controlled explosion bottled inside a metal or composite casing, pointed in one direction. Unlike liquid-fueled engines that draw from separate fuel and oxidizer tanks, solid rocket boosters carry everything pre-mixed and molded into a solid grain. You ignite them, they burn, and they push. Hard. You can’t throttle them down mid-burn, and you can’t turn them off. What you get is raw, reliable, ferocious thrust at exactly the moment you need it most.

That simplicity is what drives an enormous global market, split roughly between defense applications and space launch programs. Militaries prize solid rocket motors because they don’t require fueling before use. They sit in silos, missile batteries, and aircraft magazines for years, sometimes decades, ready to fire on command. Space agencies and commercial launch providers prize them for the same reason, plus the fact that they generate the kind of initial thrust that can push hundreds of tons off the earth’s surface in the first few minutes of flight.

The market that has grown around building, testing, and deploying these systems is worth billions of dollars annually, and it’s accelerating fast. Understanding it requires looking at who’s building the motors, who’s buying them, where the manufacturing chokepoints are, and why 2025 and early 2026 have been some of the most consequential years this industry has seen in decades.

Market Size and Growth Trajectory

The global solid rocket booster market was valued at approximately $7.04 billion in 2024, with a forecast to reach $13.47 billion by 2031 at a compound annual growth rate of 9.3%. The broader solid rocket motor market, which includes tactical missile applications beyond space launch boosters, was valued at $6.35 billion in 2025 and is projected to reach $12.99 billion by 2034 at a CAGR of 8.20%. Those figures, it should be said, are not universally agreed upon. Different research firms draw the market boundaries differently, and the resulting numbers diverge considerably. GMI puts the solid rocket motor market at $10.4 billion in 2024, growing to $23.1 billion by 2034 at an 8.4% CAGR. Mordor Intelligence estimates $8.20 billion in 2025, reaching $12.22 billion by 2030 at 8.32%. MarketsandMarkets values the market at $6.79 billion in 2024, projecting $10.00 billion by 2029 at 8.1%. The spread isn’t a sign of sloppy research; it reflects genuine methodological differences in whether a given study includes strategic ICBMs, tactical munition motors, space launch boosters, or some combination of all three. What every estimate agrees on, regardless of starting point or endpoint, is the direction: the market is growing at a meaningful pace and has been doing so consistently since at least 2022.

These are not modest numbers, and the growth story isn’t being driven by a single factor. Defense spending, satellite deployment demand, deep space exploration ambitions, and geopolitical pressure on domestic supply chains are all pulling in the same direction at the same time. Rarely in the history of this industry have all the tailwinds aligned so neatly.

North America dominates the market with a 42.36% share as of 2025. The United States is the single largest contributor, powered by NASA program spending, Department of Defense missile modernization programs, and a commercial space launch sector that continues to grow in volume and ambition. Europe holds meaningful share, particularly through the Ariane 6 program and Italy’s production expertise. Asia-Pacific is the fastest-growing region, with China and India both expanding their launch infrastructure and defense capabilities simultaneously.

The commercial segment of the market deserves particular attention. It’s growing because satellite mega-constellations require enormous launch volumes, and solid strap-on boosters are frequently the enabling technology for the heavy-lift configurations that can put dozens of satellites into orbit in a single mission. Amazon ‘s Project Kuiper constellation alone has generated hundreds of millions of dollars in booster procurement across multiple launch providers. That kind of demand is structural, not speculative.

The Defense Imperative

If there’s one thing that has changed the solid rocket motor market more than anything else in the past four years, it’s conflict. The Russian invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 exposed a painful truth: the United States and its allies had allowed their munitions production capacity to erode significantly since the Cold War. Stockpiles of missiles and precision-guided munitions that NATO assumed would last for months in a major conflict were being depleted in weeks by the demands of supplying Ukrainian forces.

Solid rocket motors sit at the heart of nearly every tactical missile system. The AIM-120 AMRAAM air-to-air missile, the AIM-9 Sidewinder, the Javelin anti-tank missile, the Stinger man-portable air defense system, the Guided Multiple Launch Rocket System munitions, and the Standard Missile family of naval interceptors all depend on solid propulsion. When consumption of these systems in Ukraine and the Middle East outpaced production, the Pentagon was forced to confront a decades-old structural problem.

The Defense Production Act Title III program became the primary vehicle for addressing this shortfall. Congress and the executive branch authorized significant new investments in domestic solid rocket motor production capacity, directed at both the established suppliers and the emerging competitors trying to enter the market. This wasn’t incremental funding. It was a recognition that the United States had allowed its munitions industrial base to reach a genuinely dangerous level of concentration.

The demand signal is not going away. Global defense budgets have been trending upward since 2022. The United States’ defense budget for fiscal year 2025 remained at historically high levels. European NATO members have been under pressure to increase their defense spending toward and beyond 2% of GDP, with several exceeding that target. Gulf states have continued aggressive military modernization programs. Taiwan’s defensive buildup has accelerated as tensions with China remain elevated. All of this demand flows, directly or indirectly, into solid rocket motor procurement.

For the manufacturers and investors paying attention to this market, the direction is unambiguous. This isn’t cyclical defense spending. It’s structural rearmament driven by a security environment that most Western governments now describe explicitly in terms of great-power competition and the possibility of extended conventional conflict.

The Duopoly That Shaped a Market

For most of the past three decades, two companies controlled virtually all solid rocket motor production for the United States military. Northrop Grumman (through its acquisition of Orbital ATK in 2017) and Aerojet Rocketdyne (later acquired by L3Harris Technologies in July 2023 for $4.7 billion) were the sole domestic sources for everything from small tactical missile motors to the enormous five-segment boosters used by NASA’s Space Launch System.

This wasn’t always the intended arrangement. The consolidation of the defense industrial base in the 1990s, which saw dozens of independent defense companies merge into a handful of primes, was actively encouraged by the Pentagon during a period when it was looking to cut costs and reduce the overhead of managing multiple suppliers. Jerry McGinn, a former senior industrial base official at the Department of Defense, has noted publicly that the Pentagon effectively backed a merger-to-monopoly in the solid rocket motor space during that decade, preferring one healthy supplier over two struggling ones.

The decision looked reasonable at the time. Demand for solid rocket motors had collapsed after the Cold War. Maintaining excess capacity made no economic sense. But the logic that worked during a period of relative geopolitical stability became a vulnerability the moment demand surged. By 2022, when U.S. and allied governments were trying to replenish depleted stockpiles and accelerate missile production, there was simply no spare capacity to turn on. Both Northrop Grumman and Aerojet Rocketdyne were already running near full utilization.

The response has been a multi-billion-dollar expansion of both existing facilities and new entrants, representing the most significant restructuring of the solid rocket motor supply base since the consolidations of the 1990s.

Northrop Grumman has been expanding its propulsion operations in Promontory, Utah and other sites. In June 2022, the company secured a multi-year contract exceeding $2 billion from United Launch Alliance to boost production of its GEM 63 and GEM 63XL solid rocket boosters, which support Amazon’s Project Kuiper and other ULA customers. The contract also funded expansion and modernization of Northrop Grumman’s manufacturing facilities, a recognition that the production infrastructure of the 1990s and 2000s was no longer sufficient for current and projected demand.

L3Harris, meanwhile, has been investing heavily in expanding the former Aerojet Rocketdyne footprint. The company invested nearly half a billion dollars into expanding its large solid rocket motor manufacturing campus in Camden, Arkansas, including $193 million for construction of over 20 new buildings adding more than 130,000 square feet of manufacturing and office space to the 2,000-acre production site. The Camden expansion was part of a broader initiative supported by a $215.6 million cooperative agreement with the Department of Defense signed in April 2023. Revenue from L3Harris’s Aerojet Rocketdyne segment increased 10.3% to $698 million in just the second quarter of 2025, and the overall Missile Solutions business posted $3.6 billion to $3.8 billion in annual revenue for 2025. L3Harris CEO Christopher Kubasik described demand growth as “durable and likely to continue for decades.”

Anduril and the New Challengers

In August 2025, the solid rocket motor market changed in a way that would have seemed implausible a decade ago. Anduril Industries, an eight-year-old defense technology company known primarily for its artificial intelligence-driven surveillance and autonomous systems, opened a full-rate solid rocket motor production facility in McHenry, Mississippi, and formally announced itself as the third U.S. supplier of solid rocket motors.

The significance of that announcement should not be underestimated. The duopoly between Northrop Grumman and L3Harris had persisted not because no one tried to break it, but because the barriers to entry were genuinely enormous. Manufacturing solid propellants requires handling explosive materials, managing complex quality control processes, and building relationships with the military procurement system that can take years to establish. Anduril’s path in was unconventional.

In 2023, Anduril acquired Adranos, a small solid rocket motor startup that had developed a proprietary fuel called ALITEC, a mixture of lithium and aluminum that its developers claimed could increase munition range by 40% compared to conventional propellants in a smaller package. The acquisition gave Anduril an immediate technological foundation in the solid propulsion space, combined with the startup’s existing relationships with defense programs. From there, Anduril moved with characteristic speed.

The company has test-fired more than 700 motors since January 2024. It invested more than $75 million of private capital into expanding its Mississippi facility from a capacity of 600 motors annually to a target of more than 6,000 tactical-scale solid rocket motors per year by the end of 2026. The 450-acre Mississippi complex is sited for millions of pounds of explosives and has been steadily renovated with new robotics equipment and automated manufacturing systems.

The government support has followed. In December 2024, the Department of Defense provided $14.3 million in initial Defense Production Act Title III funding to Anduril for solid rocket motor production expansion. In October 2025, that was followed by an additional $43.7 million DPA Title III award. In March 2025, the Army selected Anduril to build a new 4.75-inch solid rocket motor for its long-range precision rocket artillery, a motor designed to allow 30 guided rockets to launch from a single HIMARS pod. The Navy has also been evaluating Anduril as a potential third supplier for its Standard Missile program, with the company completing a live-fire test of a 21-inch diameter second-stage motor.

Palmer Luckey, Anduril’s co-founder, has been characteristically blunt about the company’s strategy. He has compared the manufacturing challenge to scaling consumer electronics production, arguing that Anduril’s background in high-volume manufacturing processes, combined with heavy automation, gives it a cost and speed advantage over incumbents whose facilities were designed for a different era. Whether that view holds up under the scrutiny of actual production at scale remains genuinely uncertain. Solid propellant manufacturing is not like making Oculus Rifts. The chemistry is dangerous, the quality standards are exacting, and any failure mode has catastrophic consequences. The automation thesis is compelling in theory; the proof is in the motors.

Anduril is not alone in the new entrant cohort. Ursa Major has been developing solid rocket motors with support from both private investors and the DoD, completing a successful extended-range motor test in collaboration with BAE Systems in August 2025. X-Bow Systems secured contracts worth $7.3 million in June 2024 to develop solid rocket motors for the Navy’s Standard Missile program, including Mk 72 booster motors and Mk 104 second-stage motors. These companies represent a genuine diversification of the supplier base, though none has yet reached the scale of the two incumbents.

L3Harris, Aerojet Rocketdyne, and the IPO That Changes Everything

The most consequential single development in the solid rocket motor market in early 2026 may not be a new motor test or a new contract. In January 2026, L3Harris announced a plan to spin off its solid rocket motor business into a new publicly traded entity, which the company calls Missile Solutions. The entity, which employed roughly 7,000 people and generated between $3.6 billion and $3.8 billion in revenue during 2025, will become an independent public company through an IPO expected in the second half of 2026.

What makes this deal structurally unusual is the involvement of the U.S. government. The Department of Defense agreed to invest $1 billion as a convertible preferred security ahead of the IPO, which will then automatically convert to common equity at the time of the public offering. L3Harris CEO Christopher Kubasik described the government’s stake as purely financial, with no board seats and no influence over management. The DoD and L3Harris are also in discussions about future multi-year procurement framework agreements for solid rocket motors, pending congressional authorization.

The implications are significant on several levels. First, it represents an unusual acknowledgment by the federal government that the health of the solid rocket motor industrial base is a matter of national security that warrants direct equity investment, not just procurement contracts. Second, it raises legitimate questions about market dynamics. If the government is a significant shareholder in one of the two dominant suppliers, how does that affect its enthusiasm for subsidizing competitors through DPA Title III grants and other mechanisms? Capital Alpha analyst Byron Callan raised exactly these questions publicly, noting the potential for conflicts of interest.

There’s also the Rocketdyne name to consider. L3Harris is in the process of selling a 60% controlling stake in its Space Propulsion and Power Systems business to private equity firm AE Industrial Partners for $845 million , with the transaction expected to close in the second half of 2026 subject to regulatory approval. AE Industrial plans to restore and use the Rocketdyne name for the acquired business , reviving a brand that traces its origins to a division of North American Aviation founded in 1955. The disaggregation of the original Aerojet Rocketdyne entity is actually a three-way split, not a clean two-part transaction. The missile and solid rocket motor business becomes Missile Solutions and goes public through the planned IPO. The space propulsion assets, including the RL-10 upper-stage engine, in-space electric thrusters, and power systems, re-emerge as a standalone Rocketdyne under AE Industrial’s ownership, with L3Harris retaining a 40% minority stake. The RS-25 engine program, which powers NASA’s Space Launch System, is explicitly excluded from the AE Industrial sale and remains fully owned and operated by L3Harris , preserving the company’s contractual commitments to NASA’s Artemis missions. Kubasik has framed both moves as potentially starting a deconsolidation of the defense industry, reversing the consolidation trends of the 1990s , stating that more prime and public companies in the defense industrial base would benefit the Department of War, taxpayers, and shareholders alike. Whether that analogy holds or whether this is primarily a financial transaction dressed up in strategic language is a question the IPO will eventually answer.

Space Launch Applications

While the defense market drives the largest share of solid rocket motor revenue, the space launch segment is where the most visible and technically spectacular applications live. And in early 2026, that segment has been defined by a single moment: the Artemis II mission.

On or around February 6, 2026, NASA’s Space Launch System (SLS) launched its first crewed flight, carrying four astronauts on a roughly 10-day mission around the Moon under the Artemis program. The twin five-segment solid rocket boosters manufactured by Northrop Grumman each stood 177 feet tall and produced 3.6 million pounds of thrust, combining to provide over 75% of the 8.8 million total pounds of thrust at liftoff. These are the world’s largest solid rocket boosters ever flown on a human spaceflight mission, evolved from the four-segment boosters of the Space Shuttle era. Each booster contains approximately 1.5 million pounds of solid propellant out of a total booster weight of 1.6 million pounds.

The boosters for the current SLS Block 1 configuration are built using steel cases repurposed from shuttle program hardware. Northrop Grumman has enough remaining shuttle booster hardware for a fixed number of additional flight sets, which is why NASA and Northrop Grumman have been developing a next-generation replacement under the Booster Obsolescence and Life Extension (BOLE) program.

The BOLE development story itself says a great deal about where solid rocket booster technology is headed. On June 26, 2025, Northrop Grumman conducted the first full-scale static fire of the BOLE Development Motor 1 at its Promontory, Utah production and test facility. The motor was 156 feet long and 3.8 meters in diameter, making it slightly larger than its predecessor. Over 700 data channels monitored 763 sensors as the motor burned for just over two minutes, producing more than 4 million pounds of thrust, making it the second most powerful solid rocket motor ever tested in history, behind only a 260-inch booster tested in the 1960s. The BOLE design uses upgraded hydroxyl-terminated polybutadiene (HTPB) propellant instead of the polybutadiene acrylonitrile (PBAN) propellant in the current boosters, and features carbon fiber composite casings replacing the steel cases, enabling better performance, faster manufacturing, and alignment with commercial standards.

There was a complication. Around 100 seconds into the test, the nozzle experienced an anomaly and separated from the motor prematurely, with debris scattering from the nozzle vicinity before the main burn concluded. Northrop Grumman and NASA acknowledged the anomaly and have committed to analyzing the data to iterate the design. This was not the first nozzle issue in Northrop Grumman’s recent history: a GEM 36XL solid rocket booster lost its nozzle during the second launch of United Launch Alliance’s Vulcan Centaur rocket in October 2024, though that incident did not prevent the mission from completing successfully.

The nozzle issues don’t indicate a systemic crisis in solid rocket booster technology, but they do underscore that pushing these systems to new performance boundaries, even with decades of institutional knowledge, carries genuine engineering risk. The BOLE program, if it proceeds to flight, is targeted for the SLS Block 2 configuration beginning with the Artemis IX mission. Whether SLS itself will still exist in the form originally planned remains politically uncertain. The Trump administration proposed canceling SLS after Artemis III in its fiscal year 2026 budget, though Congress included $4.1 billion to fund SLS through Artemis V in the One Big Beautiful Bill Act.

Beyond SLS, solid boosters appear on a wide range of commercial and government launch vehicles. United Launch Alliance’s Atlas V used solid strap-on boosters in several configurations, and ULA’s Vulcan Centaur uses Northrop Grumman’s GEM 63XL boosters. ISRO ‘s LVM3, which launched Chandrayaan-3 to the Moon in July 2023 and in December 2025 carried AST SpaceMobile’s heaviest-ever foreign satellite from Indian soil, uses two S200 solid rocket boosters each producing approximately 5,150 kilonewtons of thrust. India’s workhorse PSLV rocket has flown in configurations with up to six solid strap-on booster motors. These programs represent meaningful ongoing demand for solid propulsion that isn’t contingent on any single government’s budget decisions.

Northrop Grumman and the NASA Relationship

Northrop Grumman occupies a unique position in the solid rocket booster market. It’s simultaneously a major defense contractor, a space systems company, and the sole supplier of large solid boosters for NASA’s human spaceflight programs. The company’s propulsion lineage traces back through Orbital ATK (acquired in 2018) and before that through Thiokol, the company that manufactured the Space Shuttle’s solid rocket boosters for the entire duration of that program.

That institutional depth matters in ways that can be difficult to quantify. Manufacturing solid rocket motors for human spaceflight isn’t just about chemistry and engineering. It requires a culture of quality assurance, a body of historical data, and a supply chain vetted for the most stringent requirements in the civilian aerospace sector. Northrop Grumman’s propulsion operations at Promontory, Utah have tested and produced solid motors of various sizes for decades, accumulating a dataset and organizational memory that competitors would struggle to replicate quickly.

The company’s position as a critical supplier for Artemis also makes it politically valuable, which is not an accident. NASA and defense programs that are geographically distributed across multiple congressional districts tend to have more durable political support than programs concentrated in a handful of facilities. Northrop Grumman’s SLS booster work supports manufacturing, testing, and supply chain jobs across multiple states, and that distribution has historically insulated programs from the budget pressures that might otherwise rationalize their elimination.

Beyond SLS, Northrop Grumman manufactures the attitude control motor and abort motor for the Orion spacecraft’s Launch Abort System, the safety mechanism designed to pull the crew capsule away from the rocket if something goes wrong during launch or ascent. The company is also building the Habitat and Logistics Outpost (HALO) module for NASA’s lunar Gateway space station, putting it at the center of multiple threads of the broader lunar exploration program.

The ULA relationship is also important context. Northrop Grumman’s GEM 63 and GEM 63XL boosters are used on ULA’s Vulcan Centaur rocket, which secured a major multi-year contract in June 2022 to launch satellites for Amazon’s Project Kuiper constellation. Each Vulcan launch in its two-booster configuration uses a pair of GEM 63XL solid boosters, creating a steady and long-term demand stream for Northrop Grumman’s propulsion division that’s distinct from the SLS program and provides some insulation from the political uncertainties around NASA’s deep space programs.

European Market: Avio, ArianeGroup, and the P120C

Europe’s solid rocket booster story is largely told through two organizations and the motors they’ve built together. Avio is an Italian aerospace company headquartered in Colleferro near Rome, with over 50 years of experience in solid propulsion. ArianeGroup, a joint venture between Airbus and Safran, is the prime contractor for the Ariane family of launch vehicles. Together, through their joint venture Europropulsion, they developed the P120C, which became the largest monolithic carbon-fiber solid rocket motor in the world.

The P120C is a remarkable piece of engineering. Its carbon fiber casing is manufactured by Avio in Colleferro through filament winding, requiring 3,500 kilometers of carbon fiber wound over 33 days in a climate-controlled environment. The motor stands 13.5 meters tall and 3.4 meters in diameter, containing 142 metric tons of solid propellant (a mixture of aluminum powder, ammonium perchlorate, and hydroxyl-terminated polybutadiene binder), and generates an average thrust of approximately 4.5 meganewtons. The nozzle is produced by ArianeGroup near Bordeaux, France. Propellant loading and final motor integration take place at French Guiana, at Europe’s Spaceport.

The P120C serves a dual purpose that no other motor in the world currently replicates: it functions both as a strap-on booster for Ariane 6 and as the first stage of Vega-C. This shared building block approach was a deliberate design choice to reduce manufacturing costs by spreading production across two launcher programs, with Avio targeting production of up to 35 motor casings per year from its Colleferro facility.

On February 12, 2026, Ariane 6 made history with the launch of its first four-booster configuration, known as Ariane 64, deploying 32 Amazon Leo satellites into orbit from Europe’s Spaceport in French Guiana. The four-booster configuration more than doubles the rocket’s payload capacity compared to the two-booster version, taking Ariane 64 to approximately 21.6 metric tons to low Earth orbit. Each of the four P120C boosters fired for approximately 134 seconds. The mission confirmed Europe’s readiness for heavy-lift commercial launches at a moment when the global demand for constellation deployment missions is at an all-time high.

The European booster story doesn’t end with the P120C. Europropulsion has been developing the P160C, an upgraded variant that adds one meter of length and approximately 14 additional metric tons of propellant, increasing total propellant load to around 160 metric tons. The P160C was ground-qualified in a successful test firing on April 24, 2025, at the European Spaceport. In November 2025, Avio and ArianeGroup concluded a major contract for Ariane 6 production through 2029, including P160C boosters and other components, a deal Avio valued at over 200 million euros for its share of the work. The P160C’s igniter, notably, is manufactured by Norwegian company Nammo in Raufoss, illustrating the pan-European supply chain that underpins European launcher independence.

The P160C transition matters commercially because it positions Ariane 6 more competitively against SpaceX’s Falcon 9 and future heavy-lift competitors. More payload to orbit per launch means better economics for customers deploying large satellite constellations. Europe has been acutely aware of its competitive position against SpaceX since Falcon 9’s reusability proved that liquid rocket economics could be dramatically cheaper than anyone had assumed. The P160C won’t close that gap entirely, but it makes Ariane 6 a more credible option for payloads that genuinely need the dual-launch-vehicle architecture or the performance envelope it provides.

Asia-Pacific: India, China, and the Rising Demand

Asia-Pacific is where the future trajectory of the solid rocket booster market may be most clearly visible, though the dynamics are quite different between the two major players.

ISRO has built its launch vehicle heritage around solid propulsion in a way that reflects both technical tradition and cost discipline. The PSLV, India’s most successful rocket with 57 successful missions to its credit by 2025, uses a solid first stage and can be configured with up to six solid strap-on booster motors. The LVM3, ISRO’s heavy-lift vehicle, uses two S200 solid boosters each producing 5,150 kilonewtons of thrust. India marked its 100th launch from the Sriharikota spaceport in January 2025 with the 17th flight of the GSLV rocket.

India’s private space sector has been adding to the solid motor demand picture. In August 2025, ISRO’s ground test facility at Sriharikota conducted the first static test of the KALAM-1200, a solid rocket motor for private launch startup Skyroot Aerospace’s Vikram-1 rocket. The KALAM-1200 is an 11-meter long, 1.7-meter diameter monolithic composite motor with a propellant mass of 30 metric tons. Its successful static test was a milestone not just for Skyroot but for India’s private space sector more broadly, demonstrating that ISRO’s infrastructure could be leveraged to accelerate commercial solid motor development.

ISRO is also developing its Next Generation Launch Vehicle (NGLV), approved by the Indian Cabinet in September 2024 with a budget of approximately $970 million (INR 8,240 crore), featuring solid-fueled boosters in a semi-reusable design. The NGLV program is expected to run for eight years and is specifically intended to support India’s ambitions to establish a space station and achieve a crewed lunar landing by 2040. The S250 solid rocket boosters in the NGLV concept are part of a propulsion architecture that reflects ISRO’s continued reliance on proven solid technologies for first-stage thrust, even as it explores more advanced liquid and semi-cryogenic engines for upper stages.

China’s solid rocket booster activity is structurally different because it operates across both the state enterprise sector (dominated by the China Aerospace Science and Technology Corporation, or CASC) and an increasingly active commercial sector. Chinese commercial launch startup Galactic Energy completed the 16th mission of its CERES-1 solid-propellant rocket in January 2025, placing five satellites into orbit. The Jielong 3 rocket, a fully solid four-stage vehicle capable of delivering 1,500 kg to low Earth orbit, completed five missions in 2025 alone, with its ninth overall mission taking place in December. These commercial Chinese solid-fuel rockets have been flying more frequently than India’s entire combined government and private orbital fleet during the same period.

China’s emphasis on commercial solid-fuel small launchers reflects a strategic recognition that solid rockets offer the fastest path to commercial launch responsiveness. You can store them, transport them, and launch them quickly. For the rapidly growing satellite deployment market, particularly for smaller payloads, that flexibility matters. Chinese companies have been exploiting it aggressively.

Propellant Chemistry and the Supply Chain Chokepoint

The chemistry of solid propulsion has been largely stable for decades, but the supply chain supporting that chemistry is less stable than most observers realize. The dominant propellant type in modern solid rocket boosters for both defense and space applications is composite propellant, typically based on ammonium perchlorate as the oxidizer, aluminum powder as the fuel, and a binder such as hydroxyl-terminated polybutadiene (HTPB).

Ammonium perchlorate (AP) is the chokepoint that keeps defense supply chain officials awake at night. It’s a white crystalline salt that releases oxygen as it decomposes, enabling the aluminum fuel to combust at the temperatures and rates needed to generate thrust. There is currently only one major domestic supplier of ammonium perchlorate for U.S. military applications: Chemours, operating from a facility in Nevada. During the 1990s consolidation era, the Pentagon effectively allowed the second domestic supplier to disappear, preferring the economics of a single provider over redundancy.

An accident or fire at the Nevada facility, the kind of event that has occurred at energetics manufacturing sites before, would immediately halt the production of every domestic solid rocket motor program. This isn’t a theoretical risk. It’s the kind of single-point-of-failure that defense planners typically go to great lengths to eliminate. The irony is that the very market growth driving record demand for solid rocket motors is also flowing through this single supply chain vulnerability.

TechCrunch reporting from August 2025, when Anduril opened its Mississippi facility, noted that the ammonium perchlorate supply chain issue is a known constraint that even new entrants acknowledge. Anduril has stated publicly that it would welcome a second domestic AP supplier. The Pentagon has been aware of the issue for years. As of early 2026, no firm solution has materialized, though there are reportedly early-stage discussions about defense-funded investments in AP capacity expansion or a second production site.

Propellant formulation is also evolving. Northrop Grumman’s BOLE boosters will use upgraded HTPB propellant rather than the PBAN (polybutadiene acrylonitrile) used in the current SLS boosters. HTPB offers better energy density and is more widely used in modern motor designs. Anduril’s ALITEC propellant, the lithium-aluminum mixture developed by Adranos before its acquisition, represents a more radical departure from conventional chemistry. Anduril claims ALITEC enables comparable ranges in a significantly smaller motor package. If that performance claim holds up under extended testing and field deployment, it would have material implications for how the military thinks about motor sizing and platform integration.

Technology Trends Reshaping the Market

Three technology trends are reshaping the solid rocket booster market in ways that will compound over the next decade.

Composite casings are replacing steel. The shift from steel motor cases to carbon fiber composite casings, visible in both Northrop Grumman’s BOLE program and Avio’s P120C and P160C series, reduces weight without compromising structural integrity. Lighter casings translate directly to higher payload fractions, since every kilogram saved in the casing is a kilogram that can go toward additional propellant or payload mass. Carbon fiber composite manufacturing is also more amenable to modern automated processes than the traditional techniques used for steel case fabrication.

Additive manufacturing (3D printing) is beginning to make meaningful inroads in motor component production. While you can’t print a propellant grain, you can print nozzle components, igniter parts, and structural elements with precision that traditional machining struggles to match. In July 2025, Ursa Major signed a multi-year licensing agreement with Syndrite to use laser powder bed fusion software and tooling for metal additive manufacturing of high-performance rocket propulsion systems. Additive manufacturing can cut the number of individual parts in an assembly by up to 98% in some applications, reducing assembly time, reducing potential failure points, and compressing the timeline from design change to hardware implementation.

Automation in propellant processing and quality control is Anduril’s stated competitive differentiator. Traditional solid propellant manufacturing is labor-intensive, particularly in the processes of mixing propellant ingredients, casting the propellant grain into the motor casing, and conducting the non-destructive inspections (including X-ray imaging) required to verify structural integrity before a motor is certified for flight or firing. Automating portions of these processes doesn’t just reduce cost; it reduces the variability that comes with human manufacturing operations and potentially improves consistency across large production batches. Whether Anduril’s automation approach can deliver on these promises at scale and under the quality standards required for military applications is the central unresolved question about the company’s propulsion ambitions.

The other trend worth watching is the development of more energetic propellants. The specific impulse (a measure of propulsion efficiency, roughly analogous to fuel economy) of solid propellants has historically been lower than liquid propellants, which is one reason liquid engines dominate for applications where maximum efficiency matters. Research into high-energy density materials and novel propellant formulations has been ongoing for decades, but practical deployment has been slow because the materials that offer the highest energy density tend also to be the most difficult to handle safely and the most expensive to produce. The ALITEC propellant from Adranos, now Anduril, is one example of where this research frontier is being pushed. Advanced aluminum particles with carefully engineered surface properties are another active area.

Environmental and Regulatory Pressures

Solid rocket boosters create products of combustion that don’t disappear cleanly after launch. The exhaust from large solid motors contains aluminum oxide particles, hydrogen chloride gas (from the combustion of ammonium perchlorate), water vapor, carbon dioxide, and other species. At sea level, some of these products are direct pollutants. At altitude, the interactions with stratospheric chemistry are more complex and less well characterized.

Ammonium perchlorate itself is an environmental concern separate from combustion products. It’s a water-soluble compound that persists in groundwater and has been detected at concentrations above EPA guidance levels at and around sites where solid propellant has been manufactured, tested, or disposed of over decades. Cleanup of perchlorate-contaminated sites has cost hundreds of millions of dollars at facilities including former Olin Chemical sites and multiple DoD properties.

The regulatory response to these concerns has pushed meaningful changes in propellant chemistry. Several European countries have been moving away from ammonium perchlorate in some defense motor applications, and the European Chemicals Agency has been assessing AP as a substance of very high concern under REACH regulations. This creates both market pressure for cleaner propellant formulations and a regulatory risk for U.S. and European manufacturers who want to export motors to European customers.

The European Space Agency has been investigating alternative oxidizers that could reduce chloride emissions from solid rocket motors, though none has yet reached a stage of development where it could replace AP in a production motor at comparable performance levels. The transition from lead-based igniter components is further along; lead azide and other lead-containing materials that were formerly standard in igniter formulations have been largely replaced with lead-free alternatives across most programs, driven by both environmental regulations and workforce health concerns in manufacturing environments.

For commercial operators and launch service providers, the environmental regulatory environment is primarily relevant to range operations and potential permitting requirements at launch sites. The combustion cloud from a large solid booster is substantial. Range operations, particularly at densely operated sites like Cape Canaveral and Vandenberg Space Force Base, require careful management of these byproducts.

Investment and M&A Activity

The solid rocket motor sector has seen a meaningful increase in investment activity since 2022. The combination of strong defense demand, a clear government signal of long-term procurement intent, and the entry of well-funded startups has attracted both venture capital and private equity attention.

Anduril, despite being eight years old in 2026, is still effectively a venture-backed company that has raised multiple rounds of capital and publicly stated ambitions to pursue an eventual IPO. Its expansion into solid rocket motors is an example of a defense tech company using the current demand environment to build a position in a market segment that was previously inaccessible to new entrants.

The DoD’s $1 billion equity investment in L3Harris Missile Solutions ahead of its IPO is a genuinely novel use of government capital in the defense industrial base. It’s both an endorsement of the business and an insurance policy, ensuring that the primary domestic solid rocket motor supplier for U.S. military programs remains financially healthy and not subject to the kind of shareholder pressure that might otherwise force cost-cutting at the expense of capacity investment.

AE Industrial Partners’ pending acquisition of the Aerojet space propulsion business from L3Harris represents a private equity bet that the space propulsion market’s long-term trajectory justifies a standalone business focused on that segment. The revived Rocketdyne brand name carries significant legacy weight in the liquid engine space, but the business also includes solid propulsion capabilities for in-space applications.

Norwegian defense company Nammo has been expanding its European position in solid propulsion, serving as a supplier to multiple programs including the P160C igniter for Europropulsion and various NATO missile systems. Nammo represents the kind of specialized mid-tier supplier that operates below the prime contractor level but plays an important enabling role in multiple programs across geographies.

Supply Chain Resilience and Industrial Policy

The most persistent and arguably most important theme running through the solid rocket booster market in 2025 and early 2026 is industrial policy. Governments on both sides of the Atlantic, having recognized that strategic supply chain vulnerabilities are national security vulnerabilities, are spending real money to address them.

The U.S. defense industrial base initiative around solid rocket motors is the most active, with DoD Title III funding flowing to Anduril, Ursa Major, X-Bow Systems, and the established primes simultaneously. The logic is straightforward: a supply base with three or four capable suppliers is more resilient than one with two, and both more resilient and more competitive than one with a single dominant provider.

Europe’s approach has been different in character but similar in intent. The Europropulsion framework for P120C and P160C production ensures that both Italy and France maintain sovereign capability in solid propulsion, preventing any single national dependency. The production network deliberately spans multiple countries, which serves both industrial and political purposes within the ESA membership structure.

India’s SSLV technology transfer to HAL (Hindustan Aeronautics Limited), signed in September 2025, is another example. By transferring the fully solid three-stage SSLV’s production technology to a major domestic manufacturer, ISRO is ensuring that India’s small satellite launch capability is not dependent on ISRO’s own production throughput, which has been a limiting factor on India’s launch rate ambitions.

These policy moves are creating a more distributed and more redundant global solid rocket motor supply chain than existed five years ago. The capacity investments being made today will take years to fully come online, but the trajectory is clear. By the early 2030s, the solid rocket booster market will look structurally different from the concentrated, duopoly-dominated industry of the 2010s.

The Defense Versus Space Launch Dynamic

It’s worth spending a moment on the inherent tension between the defense and space launch segments of the solid rocket booster market, because it affects how manufacturers allocate capacity and how they price their products.

Defense solid rocket motors, particularly for tactical missiles and munitions, are produced in high volumes using relatively standardized processes, with manufacturing efficiency as a key competitive factor. The price per motor matters because the government is buying thousands or tens of thousands of units annually. Quality standards are high, but the missions are relatively short-duration and the tolerance for performance variability within a batch is somewhat broader than in human spaceflight applications.

Space launch solid boosters, particularly for large vehicles like SLS and Ariane 6, are produced in very small numbers with extremely tight quality tolerances. Each motor receives extensive individual inspection, including X-ray imaging of the propellant grain to detect any voids or discontinuities that could cause a catastrophic failure. The price per motor is vastly higher than for tactical motors, but the volume is a fraction of the defense market.

This creates an interesting allocation problem when manufacturers have constrained production capacity, which is the current situation for both Northrop Grumman and L3Harris. Adding space launch booster production typically requires dedicated facilities, tooling, and quality management systems that can’t simply be shared with high-volume tactical motor lines. Defense demand surges don’t automatically translate into space launch production increases, and vice versa.

For new entrants like Anduril, whose Mississippi facility is focused on tactical-scale motors, the path into large space launch booster manufacturing is not a natural extension of their current capabilities. Palmer Luckey has described Anduril as “going after everything” in the solid rocket motor space, but the engineering and infrastructure gap between a tactical missile motor and a 177-foot space launch booster is genuinely large. It may be that the defense and space launch segments of this market remain served by different suppliers for the foreseeable future, with overlap only in the medium-lift, smaller-booster applications.

Competitive Positioning and Market Share

Northrop Grumman currently holds the strongest position in the large space launch booster segment globally, with no near-term competitor for the SLS five-segment boosters and a strong commercial position through its GEM series with ULA. In the tactical and missile motor space, it competes directly with L3Harris’s Aerojet Rocketdyne operations across multiple programs.

L3Harris’s Aerojet Rocketdyne business, whatever form it takes post-IPO, brings a different mix of capabilities. Its Camden, Arkansas facility specializes in large solid rocket motors for missile defense and strategic programs. Its Huntsville, Alabama and Orange, Virginia facilities focus on tactical missile motors. The revenue profile of the Missile Solutions business, at $3.6 to $3.8 billion annually, makes it larger than most people realize.

In Europe, the effective market leader for solid boosters is the Europropulsion joint venture between Avio and ArianeGroup, with no domestic European competitor in the large space launch booster space. Nammo occupies a strong position in smaller tactical motors and specific components such as igniters. MT Aerospace in Germany provides structural components for European launch vehicles.

In Asia, the state-owned enterprises in China’s CASC system collectively dominate Chinese solid motor production for both military and civilian applications, with commercial entities like Galactic Energy and iSpace operating in the smaller commercial launch segment. ISRO controls Indian solid motor production for government programs, with a growing number of private startups beginning to develop indigenous capability.

The table below summarizes the primary market participants and their estimated positions in the solid rocket booster and solid rocket motor market as of early 2026.

Demand Drivers Through 2030

Several structural demand drivers will sustain market growth through at least 2030, and probably beyond.

Missile defense modernization is one of the clearest. The Golden Dome initiative in the United States, which L3Harris Technologies has cited explicitly, involves deploying a network of space-based sensors and interceptors that requires both the sensors and, eventually, the interceptors. Interceptor missiles for area air defense applications, such as the Standard Missile 6 variants, use large solid motors. The appetite for both replenishing existing interceptor stocks and fielding next-generation systems is substantial.

Satellite mega-constellation deployment will continue to drive demand for heavy-lift launch vehicles through the late 2020s. Amazon’s Project Kuiper needs thousands of satellites launched over the next several years. Other constellation programs from Telesat, SES, and Chinese operators are all in various stages of deployment. Each heavy-lift launch mission using solid strap-on boosters, whether on Ariane 64, ULA’s Vulcan with GEM 63XL boosters, or other vehicles, represents solid motor demand.

Hypersonic weapons development is an emerging category. Multiple countries, including the United States, China, Russia, Australia, and several European nations, are developing hypersonic glide vehicles and hypersonic cruise missiles. Many of these weapons use solid rocket motors as their primary propellant for the initial boost phase. Anduril’s 21-inch hypersonic motor test for the Navy is an example of this emerging segment.

Finally, the new entrant commercial launch market will drive demand for solid motors in small and medium launch vehicles. Fully solid small launch vehicles like China’s Jielong series and India’s SSLV offer responsive, low-cost access to orbit that is attractive for constellation replenishment and dedicated small satellite missions. As more of these vehicles enter service globally, the cumulative demand for solid motors will grow.

Risks and Constraints

The market is not without real constraints that could slow or complicate its growth trajectory.

The ammonium perchlorate supply chain vulnerability described above is the most structurally serious risk. A disruption at Chemours’s Nevada facility would simultaneously halt production at both Northrop Grumman and L3Harris, as well as every other U.S. domestic solid motor manufacturer. This is not a theoretical scenario. The incentive to fix it is clear, but the capital investment required to build a second AP production facility, combined with the environmental permitting complexities, means the fix is not straightforward.

Workforce development is a slower-developing constraint that industry insiders consistently flag. Solid propellant manufacturing requires skilled technicians who understand energetics safety protocols, propellant chemistry, and quality inspection methods. There are a limited number of qualified workers, and training new ones takes time. As the industry expands capacity simultaneously across multiple companies, competition for this talent pool will intensify.

The environmental regulatory trajectory around ammonium perchlorate poses a longer-term risk, particularly for export markets in Europe where regulatory pressure on the chemical is more acute. Alternative propellant chemistries are being developed, but the performance penalties and development costs associated with transitioning from established propellant formulations are real.

Geopolitical constraints on technology transfer affect the international market. U.S. solid rocket motor technology is tightly controlled under International Traffic in Arms Regulations (ITAR). This limits the ability of U.S. manufacturers to export motors or motor components without extensive licensing, and can complicate joint development programs with allied nations. European manufacturers have historically benefited from this constraint, as their technology falls under less restrictive (though still controlled) export regimes.

Summary

The solid rocket booster market in early 2026 is more dynamic than it has been at any point in the past 30 years. The simultaneous surge in defense demand, driven by global conflicts and rearmament, and the growth in commercial space launch activity has put the two dominant manufacturers under extraordinary capacity pressure while also creating conditions that have allowed new entrants to establish genuine footholds.

The $7 billion market of 2024 is on a trajectory toward $13 billion or more by the early 2030s, with the growth broadly distributed across defense tactical motors, large space launch boosters, and emerging categories like hypersonic weapons propulsion. North America maintains its dominant position, but Asia-Pacific’s growth rate is the steepest, as China’s commercial solid-fuel launch industry matures and India continues to expand both its government and private space launch capabilities.

The most significant structural change taking place is the managed dissolution of the U.S. solid rocket motor duopoly. The government has made a strategic decision that a supply base with only two credible suppliers is not resilient enough for the threat environment it anticipates over the next two decades. Anduril’s Mississippi facility, the new entrant programs at Ursa Major and X-Bow, the government’s $43.7 million DPA Title III investment in Anduril alongside similar investments in others, and the pending IPO of L3Harris Missile Solutions with a $1 billion DoD anchor investment, are all expressions of the same underlying policy judgment: solid rocket motor production capacity is a strategic asset that needs to be treated like one.

What’s less certain is exactly how the technology evolves. The shift to composite casings, the introduction of more energetic propellants, and the potential for automation to fundamentally change manufacturing economics are all real developments. But predicting how quickly any of them will reach scale, and at what cost premium or discount relative to current methods, involves genuine uncertainty. The BOLE nozzle anomaly during the June 2025 test at Promontory is a useful reminder that even the world’s most experienced solid rocket motor manufacturer, working with the most advanced new design of its kind, can encounter unexpected failure modes. This industry rewards institutional humility. The companies that have thrived in it are the ones that combine engineering excellence with a genuine respect for how unforgiving the physics can be when something goes wrong.

Appendix: Top 10 Questions Answered in This Article

What is the global solid rocket booster market size as of 2024 to 2026?

The global solid rocket booster market was valued at approximately $7.04 billion in 2024 and is forecast to reach $13.47 billion by 2031 at a compound annual growth rate of 9.3%. The broader solid rocket motor market (which includes tactical missile applications) was valued at $6.35 billion in 2025 and is projected to reach $12.99 billion by 2034.

Who are the dominant companies in the solid rocket motor market?

The two historically dominant U.S. suppliers are Northrop Grumman and L3Harris Technologies (through its Aerojet Rocketdyne subsidiary). In Europe, Avio and ArianeGroup jointly develop and produce solid boosters through their Europropulsion joint venture. New entrants including Anduril Industries, Ursa Major, and X-Bow Systems are beginning to establish positions in the U.S. tactical motor segment.

What is breaking the solid rocket motor duopoly in the United States?

A combination of surging defense demand from global conflicts, U.S. government policy through Defense Production Act Title III funding, and venture-backed defense startups entering the market is breaking the decades-long duopoly. Anduril Industries opened a full-rate production facility in Mississippi in August 2025, becoming the third U.S. solid rocket motor supplier, with a target of 6,000 tactical motors per year by end of 2026.

What role do solid rocket boosters play in the NASA Space Launch System?

Northrop Grumman manufactures twin five-segment solid rocket boosters for each SLS launch, each standing 177 feet tall and producing 3.6 million pounds of thrust. Together they provide over 75% of the rocket’s total 8.8 million pounds of thrust at liftoff. These are the largest solid rocket boosters ever flown on a human spaceflight mission.

What is the P120C and why is it significant for Europe?

The P120C is the world’s largest monolithic carbon-fiber solid rocket motor, developed jointly by Avio and ArianeGroup through their joint venture Europropulsion. It serves as both a strap-on booster for Ariane 6 and the first stage of the Vega-C launcher. The P120C achieved a milestone in February 2026 when four P120C boosters powered the first Ariane 64 mission, which delivered 32 Amazon Leo satellites to orbit and confirmed Europe’s heavy-lift launch capability.

What is the BOLE program and what happened during its first test?

The Booster Obsolescence and Life Extension (BOLE) program is developing the next-generation solid rocket booster for NASA’s SLS Block 2 configuration, beginning with Artemis IX. On June 26, 2025, Northrop Grumman conducted the first static fire of the BOLE Development Motor 1 at Promontory, Utah, producing over 4 million pounds of thrust, making it the second most powerful segmented solid rocket motor ever tested. A nozzle anomaly occurred near the end of the burn and is being analyzed for design iteration.

What drives solid rocket motor demand in the defense sector?

Ongoing global conflicts, particularly the Russia-Ukraine war and conflicts in the Middle East, have depleted U.S. and allied tactical munitions stockpiles. Nearly all major missile systems, from Javelin anti-tank missiles to Standard Missile naval interceptors, use solid rocket motors. Defense modernization programs, missile defense expansion, and hypersonic weapons development are all adding to sustained demand that multiple industry leaders have described as durable for decades.

What is the ammonium perchlorate supply chain risk?

Ammonium perchlorate is the primary oxidizer used in most composite solid propellants. The United States has effectively only one domestic producer, Chemours, operating from a Nevada facility. A disruption at this facility would halt production across all U.S. solid rocket motor manufacturers simultaneously. This single-point-of-failure in the supply chain is widely recognized as a strategic vulnerability, though a durable solution had not yet been implemented as of early 2026.

How does Asia-Pacific fit into the global solid rocket booster market?

Asia-Pacific is the fastest-growing region in the solid rocket motor market. India’s ISRO operates solid-boosted rockets including the PSLV and LVM3, and approved the $970 million Next Generation Launch Vehicle program with solid-fueled boosters in September 2024. China’s state and commercial sectors both operate solid-fuel launch vehicles, with commercial operators like Galactic Energy completing multiple missions annually. India’s private space startups, including Skyroot Aerospace, are also developing indigenous solid rocket motors.

What is the significance of the L3Harris Missile Solutions IPO in 2026?

L3Harris announced in January 2026 that it will spin off its solid rocket motor business, Missile Solutions, as a publicly traded company in the second half of 2026. The Department of Defense agreed to invest $1 billion as a convertible preferred security that will convert to equity at IPO. Missile Solutions employs approximately 7,000 people and generated $3.6 billion to $3.8 billion in revenue in 2025. The deal represents an unprecedented direct equity stake by the U.S. government in a defense industrial base company and is intended to anchor the firm’s long-term production capacity commitments.