@snowmaker: It's almost hard to believe, but the US has only a single factory left that makes HMX and RDX, the explosives in nearly…

X AI KOLs Following News
defense-tech energetics solugen military supply-chain manufacturing

Summary

Solugen, a startup originally making petroleum-industry chemicals, has pivoted to producing HMX and RDX energetics for the US military, addressing a bottleneck where the US relied on a single aging WWII-era plant in Tennessee. The company claims a 100% CONUS energetics supply chain and can already produce a tenth of the legacy plant's output.

It's almost hard to believe, but the US has only a single factory left that makes HMX and RDX, the explosives in nearly every modern missile and bomb - an aging wwii plant in Tennessee that's massively backordered. A few years ago, a startup called Solugen was making chemicals for the petroleum industry, when by happenstance they heard about this problem. It turns out that the same infrastructure they'd built for other chemicals was a perfect fit to make energetics. So, that's what they're doing now. They can already make 1/10 of what the old US army plant makes, and in the future will make much more. This is the SpaceX/Anduril moment for the US military explosives market.
Original Article
View Cached Full Text

Cached at: 10/30/26, 11:25 PM

It’s almost hard to believe, but the US has only a single factory left that makes HMX and RDX, the explosives in nearly every modern missile and bomb - an aging wwii plant in Tennessee that’s massively backordered.

A few years ago, a startup called Solugen was making chemicals for the petroleum industry, when by happenstance they heard about this problem. It turns out that the same infrastructure they’d built for other chemicals was a perfect fit to make energetics.

So, that’s what they’re doing now. They can already make 1/10 of what the old US army plant makes, and in the future will make much more.

This is the SpaceX/Anduril moment for the US military explosives market.

Gaurab Chakrabarti (@Gaurab): In four days of the Iran war, the US and its allies fired more Tomahawks than the US builds in four years. One bottleneck is energetics production.

So we built a 100% CONUS energetics supply chain with our own capital. Our modular solution makes HMX and other advanced

Similar Articles

Dallas startup enriches Uranium

Hacker News Top

Actinide, a Dallas-based startup, has become the first startup to enrich natural uranium into HALEU using its own calutron technology, bypassing traditional supply chain bottlenecks for advanced nuclear reactors.

X-energy and its helium-cooled nuclear reactors

MIT Technology Review

MIT Technology Review profiles X-energy, which is developing the helium-cooled Xe-100 small modular reactor to supply high-temperature industrial heat and 24/7 power for data centers as part of a push to decarbonize heavy industry.