3D-Printing Rocket Propellant with Firehawk Aerospace's Will Edwards

Will Edwards is the co-founder and CEO of Firehawk Aerospace, a defense technology company that uses 3D printing to mass-produce rocket propellant, solid rocket motors, and full rocket systems.

What was the aha moment that led you from software into rocketry?

Honestly, it wasn't really an aha moment. In 2019, I was living in Santa Monica and working in HR software. It was a lot of work, but it wasn't impactful or satisfying. At the same time, the space craze was in full swing. You had companies like Relativity Space, Astra, and ABL getting started, and I thought what they were building was incredibly cool.

My co-founder Ron Jones had been working on 3D-printed rocket fuel for hybrid rocket engines. He needed help on the operations and fundraising side, so I decided to go for it. My co-founders are my dad, Steve Edwards, and Ron Jones. My dad brought us together. He spent years on Capitol Hill and now lives in Oklahoma. That is where we met Ron. My dad eventually went back to his day job, and I had so much fun working with Ron that we went all in around 2020. The best thing I took from software was learning how to work with engineers. They are a unique breed, and getting them to sell themselves properly translated well into this world.

What is the core problem Firehawk Aerospace set out to solve, and what was the breakthrough?

We did not start with solid rocket motors. We tried to build a hybrid rocket engine for defense, and we quickly learned that you cannot disrupt the supply chain in this country. A hybrid engine changes how an existing system is built, and the primes do not love that.

So we did something I think is pretty incredible. We found a way to advance-manufacture, or 3D print, propellant with the energetics mixed in. There is no separate oxidizer tank. We produce the same kind of grain with the same performance and the same energetic density, but we are not mixing and curing it. That let us point to a system in use today and make a propellant grain for it using the existing technical data package. We cut production from about 60 days to roughly six hours.

The team made this happen. We hired PhDs and brought in people from Raytheon, Lockheed, Northrop, and NAMMO. We started with potassium perchlorate because it is less sensitive to heat. You can extrude and melt with it and it's less likely to blow up. The military would not adopt it, though, because it does not perform as well as ammonium perchlorate. We kept working the same formulation until we could print with ammonium perchlorate. That material is far more sensitive to heat, and we got there about two and a half years ago.

Every motor test and every flight you see from Firehawk is powered by propellant produced in house. I have never bought propellant from anyone else, and I never will. That is a real differentiator in this industry.

You started with propellant. How does that expand into motors and full rocket systems?

My biggest issue with defense startups today is the pitch that these companies are going to build everything. Everyone wants to say they build the entire system from tip to tail because it is sexy to show the entire end product. Defense is a components based business. Producing components is sexy because that is how you make money.

Our vision was to produce rocket propellant at high volume for low cost. If we can do that, we can make the motors. If we can make the motors, we can integrate and build the whole rocket system. Our Lawton, Oklahoma, facility will be able to produce nearly 2 million pounds of propellant next year. I would be shocked if another startup is close to even 100,000 pounds right now.

We are also making the motors, from artillery shell motors to rocket-assisted takeoff systems, where we have cut cost significantly and increased volume. Our facility in Crawford, Mississippi, came turnkey at about 50,000 missiles a year, and we are expanding it toward 120,000 a year. We started with propellant and perfected it. Now we build the motors and integrate the full systems.

How are today's global conflicts shaping demand and the opportunity for new defense companies?

It honestly has not changed our production schedule much. Almost nothing being fired worldwide right now is coming from startups. The systems you see deployed are made by the big incumbents, and those companies have depleted a lot of their stockpiles.

That has made room for exceptions to the norm. Buyers do not have time to wait several years for a prime to replenish everything, so they are willing to take a risk on smaller companies. Artillery is still the queen of the battlefield, as they say in Europe. It is the lowest cost per kill, and at one point roughly 70 percent of all kills were artillery shells. They shot through 14 million shells in about a year and a half. When they ran out of artillery, that is what gave rise to drones.

So if a company can produce artillery at volume, at a good price, and at the right range, the opportunity is big. The same is true for Iran. The Pacific brings longer-range requirements, along with counter-drone work that suits our smaller rockets. These conflicts have exposed real gaps in our industrial base. I do not think it is as dire as LinkedIn makes it sound. There are gaps to fill, and well-positioned defense companies stand to make real money.

You have an analogy about KitchenAid mixers. Can you walk through it?

The primes, like Northrop Grumman and Aerojet Rocketdyne, are amazing at making wedding cakes. They mix about 5,000 pounds of propellant per batch in enormous mixers that can cost tens of millions of dollars. Startups cannot even buy those mixers, because companies like L3 and Northrop have them locked down on five- to seven-year wait lists.

If you are pouring 5,000 pounds into five large rocket motors, that is scalable. It is very hard, but it is scalable. If you have to pour that same batch into 1,500 or 3,000 small molds, that is a real pain. Picture a KitchenAid mixer. Pouring the batter into one giant cake pan is easy. Pouring it into dozens of little cupcake trays is not.

What Firehawk does well is skip the mixer entirely. We make a very energetic feedstock, and that feedstock is 3D printed or compression molded almost immediately into the shape of the motor grain. The primes make beautiful wedding cakes at high volume, and that is genuinely hard to do. We make the cupcakes.

What does the future of defense look like if Firehawk succeeds, and how do you stay focused?

The biggest surprise has been how enormous the artillery motor market is. I did not expect Firehawk to move so quickly into those programs or to execute at these volumes. By next year, I think we will be the largest artillery shell motor provider in the United States. I want to be the largest in the world. Rockets are fun, and watching an artillery motor come together and fire off a 155 mm is epic.

Firehawk will not be the only propulsion company that succeeds. There are really only about three of us in the country doing this today, and we will serve different needs. No startup is going to displace Aerojet or Northrop Grumman, but we can all supplement them. If Lockheed needs 10,000 PrSM missiles, no startup has the infrastructure to produce that much propellant in a year. A startup that can deliver hundreds of motors is still a huge value add.

We are going to stay in our lane. We make artillery motors and small systems, from 2.75-inch to 7-inch air-to-air rockets, and I am not interested in building massive hypersonic or standard missiles yet. I never wanted Firehawk to raise a ton of money and then go buy other companies. I have said I would shut my doors before becoming a cast-and-cure company. We raised money to fix one problem, which is making propellant cheap and abundant. Now our capital goes into turning everything on and producing at scale.

You were drawn in by the new space companies. Is there a world where Firehawk moves into space?

Absolutely, there is a world for that down the road. For now, you have to stay focused and become profitable first. We want to win the defense market first. Once we do, I can see commercial and space applications for Firehawk. It is just not where our focus is yet.

How do you define deep tech?

Anything that is not vibe coding, really. Deep tech can touch almost anything. Even the logistics that power a company like Uber are unbelievable technology. To me, deep tech is anything that takes serious brainpower and serious investment to build real infrastructure. Amazon's last-mile delivery was deep tech at one point. Today we take cloud computing for granted, but when AWS was being built it required enormous technical investment and created entirely new capabilities for startups and enterprises. If what you build helps power a rocket company, a space company, or an AI company, then in its own way, that is deep tech.

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