Ursa Major, the Colorado-based leader in deploying additive manufacturing (AM) for propulsion solutions, has received a contract from an unnamed customer for geostationary earth orbit (GEO) propulsion systems. The multi-year contract worth $10-15 million will be devoted to R&D, manufacturing, assembly, integration, and testing of a propulsion system for a satellite bus.
In recent years, Ursa Major has become increasingly vital to future plans for the US defense industrial base (DIB), acquiring key contracts from across the DoD and attracting significant private sector investment. A year ago, the company’s Hadley liquid propulsion engine successfully launched on its first test flight, powering a Stratolaunch Talon A-1 testbed that approached hypersonic speeds.
In 2023, Ursa Major revealed its process for producing solid rocket motors (SRMs) with AM, an application driving major AM market penetration into the defense sector. An important partner of organizations like America Makes, Ursa Major is also a critical customer of AM hardware OEMs like Velo3D and EOS.
Stratolaunch’s Talon-A1 prepares for flight powered by Ursa Major’s Hadley engine.
In a press release about Ursa Major’s $10-15 million contract for GEO propulsion systems, the company’s CEO, Dan Jablonsky, said, “This award demonstrates the engineering rigor in propulsion systems to yield a new generation of highly maneuverable buses at significantly faster lead times than currently fielded systems.”
Ursa Major’s propulsion system includes the integration of key components such as tanks, thrusters, and avionics.
I’ve written about Ursa Major as much as I’ve written about any other AM company over the last few years, and I more or less always point out how the company is one of the US’s — and the world’s — biggest AM success stories of the 2020s. And as many times as I point that out, it is always worth reiterating, especially for companies looking to reshore manufacturing supply chains to their domestic economies.
This latest contract amply demonstrates that fact: in a March, 2024 interview with Joe Laurienti, the company’s founder and CEO at the time, Laurienti told me that propulsion for GEO systems was one of the markets the company was most interested in targeting next. One of Ursa Major’s most admirable qualities is its ability to set an objective and work tirelessly toward it until it’s achieved, and the whole AM industry could benefit from studying how the company continuously manages to do that.
As I wrote in a recent article about Rocket Lab’s pending acquisition of laser communication provider Mynaric, the US space industry is moving with the type of urgency that signals intensifying geopolitical tensions on the horizon. Given how prominent a partnership that Ursa Major has with America Makes — one of the institutions that just scored over $60 million in funding as part of the Youngstown Innovation Hub for Aerospace and Defense initiative — Ursa Major seems to already have a rather solid plan in place for enacting the next phase in its evolution.
Images courtesy of Ursa Major