U.S. Army adds four new makers of its workhorse rocket

A rocket that has flown more than 1.7 million times in the last decade alone just got a second, third, and fourth supplier, and the Army says that redundancy could mean the difference between running out of ammunition and staying ready for whatever comes next.

Firehawk Aerospace, a Texas-based rocket propulsion company, announced that the U.S. Army awarded it a contract known as an Other Transaction Authority agreement, a flexible acquisition tool that lets the Pentagon fund new prototypes faster than traditional contracting rules typically allow, to help diversify the supply chain behind the Hydra-70, the unguided 70-millimeter rocket that has served as one of the American military’s most heavily used munitions since the Vietnam era. The U.S. Army confirmed the broader award in a separate article published the following day, revealing that Firehawk was one of four companies selected for the effort, alongside iRocket, Nammo Perry, and Albers.

“The U.S. Army has awarded Firehawk an OTA agreement to diversify the Hydra-70 rocket supply chain and revitalize its defense industrial base,” Firehawk said.

The Army’s own account of the award, published by the service’s Aviation Rocket and Small Guided Munitions Product Office, based in Huntsville, Alabama, explained that the four companies were selected through a marketplace called One Nation Innovation, a sourcing platform the Army has used to connect with defense manufacturers outside its traditional roster of established prime contractors.

Each of the four vendors will now build 24 prototype versions of the Hydra-70 M151 High Explosive rocket, one of several standard warhead configurations in the Hydra-70 family, while simultaneously helping modernize the rocket’s Technical Data Package, the detailed government-owned engineering blueprint that spells out exactly how the munition must be built. Updating that data package matters because it is the document that ultimately determines which companies are technically capable of manufacturing the rocket at all, and a clearer, more manufacturable design makes it easier for new suppliers to enter production without years of costly reverse engineering.

The Hydra-70 itself traces its design lineage back to a Navy rocket first developed in the late 1940s, and the modern version has become a workhorse fired from Apache and Cobra attack helicopters as well as fixed-wing aircraft like the F-16, serving every branch of the U.S. military alongside dozens of allied foreign forces. On its own, the rocket is a relatively simple, unguided weapon built around a standard MK66 rocket motor paired with one of several interchangeable warheads, but attaching the Advanced Precision Kill Weapon System guidance kit transforms it into a laser-guided precision weapon capable of hitting much smaller targets than the unguided version ever could. That guided variant has taken on a growing second life as a counter-drone weapon in recent years, offering the Pentagon a way to shoot down small, cheap enemy drones for a fraction of the cost of firing a Hellfire missile, which typically runs between $150,000 and $200,000 per unit, a price gap that has mattered increasingly as American forces have confronted sustained drone attacks during recent operations tied to tensions with Iran.

Demand for that capability has been colliding with a production ceiling the Army has openly acknowledged needs fixing. Briefing materials the Army’s rocket program office shared with industry last year put the system’s current maximum production rate at roughly 330,000 rockets per year, though actual annual output has typically fallen short of that ceiling even as the Army fires more than 100,000 rockets annually in training alone, on top of whatever combat and operational demand requires. General Dynamics Ordnance and Tactical Systems has functioned as the Hydra-70 program’s primary system integrator for decades, having produced more than 5 million of the rockets since 1996 under contracts including a $3.42 billion Army award, but relying so heavily on a single established manufacturer leaves the Army with limited options if that one supplier faces a disruption, a vulnerability the new OTA agreements are specifically designed to reduce by proving out additional qualified production sources.

Firehawk’s own explanation of why it exists as a company lines up directly with the problem this contract is meant to solve.

“This is why Firehawk was founded. To expand manufacturing capacity of the military’s most widely used munitions,” Firehawk said.

“Deterrence depends on production,” Firehawk added.

Founded in 2019 by CEO Will Edwards, Firehawk has built its business around applying modern manufacturing techniques, particularly 3D printing, to rocket motor and propellant production, a Texas-based operation that has grown quickly enough to cut the ribbon this year on a new rocket integration facility in Crawford, Mississippi, capable of producing 40,000 rockets annually with plans to triple that capacity by 2028. The company has separately built a propellant plant investment in Oklahoma valued around $100 million and holds additional propulsion contracts tied to other major weapons systems including the Javelin anti-tank missile, the Stinger man-portable air-defense missile, and the Guided Multiple Launch Rocket System, giving Firehawk a broader footprint in solving the same kind of solid rocket motor supply bottlenecks that have quietly constrained multiple major American weapons programs at once. The company has attracted backing that reflects how seriously investors are taking that pitch, including a $60 million Series C funding round led by 1789 Capital and a separate strategic investment from Hanwha Defense USA, the American arm of the South Korean defense conglomerate.

The Army’s stated plan extends well beyond these initial 24-rocket prototype batches from each company. According to the service’s own announcement, successful prototype demonstrations under this program are expected to trigger follow-on agreements expanding the effort to other variants within the broader Hydra-70 family, a product line the Army typically procures in quantities of 100,000 to 200,000 rockets annually, meaning any company that proves it can reliably build the M151 prototype stands to compete for a meaningfully larger share of one of the Pentagon’s highest-volume munitions programs going forward.