CULPEPER, Va. — L3Harris has begun clearing forest and carving out roads deep in the Virginia countryside, breaking ground on a major expansion at its Orange County facility to produce small and medium solid rocket motors – key components for the Javelin antitank weapon.
As part of the Defense Production Act used to boost the replenishment of weapons sent to Ukraine, L3Harris’ Aerojet Rocketdyne is building state-of-the art facilities for solid rocket motor production, such as casting and assembly, and for mixing and grinding operations while upgrading its testing plant.
The U.S. has sent Ukraine over 10,000 shoulder-fired Javelin systems since Russia invaded in February 2022 and is now working to replenish its depleted stock. Javelin is a joint venture between Lockheed Martin and Raytheon. Aerojet Rocketdyne supplies the rocket motors for the weapon.
Lockheed Martin aims to boost annual production from 2,400 Javelin missiles to nearly 4,000 by 2026, and Aerojet will need to contribute to meet the demand.
Aerojet is constructing five new buildings that will move all work it does to build small and medium rocket motors, primarily Javelin, from Camden, Arkansas, to Orange county. It is primarily funded using a portion of the $215 million in Defense Production Act funding the company received for capacity ramp up efforts.
The aim is to complete construction in the third or fourth quarter of 2026 and then begin moving into production in early 2027, Scott Alexander, L3Harris’ missile solutions president, told reporters.
The company has been tucked in the Shenandoah hills for 30 years, making a number of rocket motors for major programs including the Standard Missile, the Trident II D5 and the jettison motor for NASA’s Artemis program. The area is also home to its center of excellence for propellant research and SRM production and has a robust testing facility that includes work on ramjet and scramjet technology development.
L3Harris has also broken ground on new facilities in Camden, Arkansas, including a 60,000 square foot setup to concentrate on ramping up production of the rocket motors used in the Guided Multiple Launch Rocket System that is fired from the Army’s High Mobility Artillery Rocket System, another critical weapon sent to Ukraine to help it beat back the Russian invasion.
And it is shifting all of its inert components like motor cases to Huntsville, Alabama.
Overall, the company has doubled its internal investment in Aerojet’s SRM production since acquiring it in 2023, Alexander said.
The new buildings will leverage “a lot of automation, robotics,” Julie Wikete, Aerojet’s Orange site director, told reporters May 21 at the facility. “How do we improve the overall experience here? And especially with building these new, we’re able to leverage a lot of that more future factory approach that’s going to lend ourselves directly to increasing the overall output of Javelin.”
The new facilities will allow the company to increase its overall production capacity for Javelin solid rocket motors by 20% through strategic building and production line designs that cut the distance traveled across the facility during various stages of the process by 90%, Wikete said.
“We are reducing the overall time to build, which just immediately translates to faster out the door,” she noted.
The expansion represents significant growth, although the number of new employees that will be needed at the facility is still being evaluated.
“We’re always hiring,” Wikete said. “Javelin is one program that is coming here … we are also growing in other areas,” she said. “We’ll continue to evaluate that as programs come online and more and more jobs will be opened up at that point.”
With the addition of new production practices like robotics and automation that will enhance the process, the benefits include “statistical reliability in what you’re building and how you’re building,” Alexander said. “You take a lot of the human factor out of that, but also it is more efficient and so ultimately that is going to affect the cost per round in terms of it being economical.”
Jen Judson is an award-winning journalist covering land warfare for Defense News. She has also worked for Politico and Inside Defense. She holds a Master of Science degree in journalism from Boston University and a Bachelor of Arts degree from Kenyon College.