Ursa Major hosts RTX CEO as munitions demand surges

RTX CEO Christopher Calio and leaders from RTX, RTX Ventures, and Raytheon traveled to Berthoud, Colorado recently to visit Ursa Major’s headquarters. A meeting that put one of the defense industry’s most important propulsion startups in the same room as the leadership of one of its largest primes at a moment when solid rocket motor production has become a national priority.

Ursa Major announced the visit, describing what the company showcased to its guests: flight-proven hypersonic systems and readiness to scale solid rocket motor production to support increased capacity for munitions. The company’s framing was direct. “As the need for munitions accelerates,” Ursa Major said, “Ursa Major is prepared to partner, scale with urgency and deliver for the warfighter.”

The visit reflects a defense industrial reality that has been building pressure for several years. The United States has been consuming precision munitions at rates that peacetime production planning did not anticipate, driven by Ukraine aid packages, Arabian Gulf operations, and the broader strategic reassessment that has pushed the Department of War and Congress to prioritize munitions stockpile replenishment across multiple programs. Solid rocket motors sit at the foundation of that replenishment challenge. Virtually every major missile and rocket system in the American arsenal depends on a solid propellant motor at some point in its flight, and the industrial capacity to manufacture those motors at scale has been a persistent constraint on how fast the United States can actually rebuild its depleted inventories.

Founded in 2015 and headquartered in Berthoud, a small city along Colorado’s Front Range between Denver and Fort Collins, the company has built its identity around American-made, commercially developed rocket propulsion, specifically targeting the gap between legacy defense primes and the agility that modern propulsion programs require. The company has been developing solid rocket motors intended to support hypersonic weapons programs, a category that has received sustained investment from the Department of War as the United States works to field competitive hypersonic strike capability against adversaries who have already deployed such systems operationally.

The hypersonic propulsion dimension is where Ursa Major’s technological maturity claim carries the most weight. Hypersonic weapons — systems capable of sustained flight at speeds exceeding Mach 5 — require propulsion systems that can operate under extreme thermal and mechanical stress conditions that conventional rocket motors were not designed to handle. Flight-proven hypersonic propulsion is a meaningful credential in a market where many programs are still working through development challenges, and Ursa Major’s ability to present that credential to RTX leadership gives the visit more than symbolic significance. It positions the company as a supplier with demonstrated capability rather than a development-stage prospect seeking validation.

The solid rocket motor scaling argument connects directly to where the defense industrial base conversation has been heading. The Department of War has made expanding domestic solid rocket motor production capacity a stated priority, and multiple programs — from interceptor missiles to long-range precision fires to hypersonic strike — are competing for production slots at a manufacturing base that was sized for a different threat environment and a different pace of consumption. Ursa Major’s pitch to Calio and the RTX and Raytheon delegations was, at its core, about capacity: the company’s ability to manufacture at scale, with urgency, in support of programs that cannot afford production bottlenecks.

RTX is not a disinterested observer of the propulsion supply chain. Raytheon — RTX’s defense segment — is the prime contractor for some of the most production-intensive missile programs in the American arsenal, including the AIM-120 AMRAAM, the AIM-9X Sidewinder, the Patriot missile family, and the Stinger. Each of those programs depends on solid rocket motor supply, and Raytheon has direct programmatic reasons to understand who in the industrial base can reliably deliver motors at pace. RTX Ventures, the corporation’s venture investment arm, has been actively investing in defense technology companies as the broader defense technology investment landscape has accelerated following Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine. The combination of RTX corporate leadership, Raytheon program management perspectives, and RTX Ventures investment interest in the same visit to a solid rocket motor startup is a precise alignment of the different ways a large prime might engage with an emerging supplier.

None of that translates automatically into a contract, a partnership, or an investment. What the Berthoud visit confirms is that RTX’s most senior leadership considered Ursa Major worth the trip — and that Ursa Major had enough to show them that the visit was worth making. In the defense propulsion world, that kind of sustained senior attention from a prime of RTX’s scale is not routine for a company of Ursa Major’s size.