As Aerojet Rocketdyne’s “center of excellence” for solid rocket motor (SRM) production, the Camden, Arkansas, facility is a major point of focus as the company invests internal capital and executes the $215.6M cooperative agreement signed last year with the Department of Defense to expand and modernize facilities to support increased production of SRMs.
Aerojet Rocketdyne, an L3Harris Technologies company, manufactures more than 100,000 SRMs each year in Camden. Roughly 1,100 employees work at the site, which encompasses nearly 2,000 acres with 1.35M square feet of floor space spread across 150 buildings. The SRMs Camden produces range in size from large boosters the size of a small car, to small steering motors that can fit in the palm of your hand. The motors propel some of America’s most critical defense systems like THAAD, Standard Missile, Stinger, Javelin and the Patriot Missile System.
The Camden team has been a part of the Southern Arkansas community for more than 40 years, and as the site has grown, the company has worked to modernize its production facilities to increase operational efficiency. Camden has been a beehive of construction activity over the past several years as the company has upgraded existing buildings and built several new, purpose-built facilities in an effort to accelerate production of SRMs, which are so critical to the security of our nation and its allies.
“Our Camden facility modernization effort marked an important milestone when we opened our state-of-the-art Engineering, Manufacturing & Development facility in 2020,” said Baq Emadi, Director of Operations at the Camden site. “We designed the facility to support current and future advanced large solid rocket motor programs, including hypersonics and missile defense targets.”
Next up, in 2022, Camden opened a new 51,000 square foot production facility that consolidated several SRM manufacturing activities under one roof and added advanced equipment, including modern tool-up bays, dedicated propellant casting and oven areas, and upgraded X-ray systems, all emphasizing a safe and efficient production process. These improvements increased factory throughput by eliminating the need to transport the product from building to building to complete each step in the production process. Employees at this facility manufacture SRMs for the Patriot Advanced Capability-3 (PAC-3) Missile Segment Enhancement (MSE), the PAC-3’s newest and most capable variant.
More recently, investments made in the PAC-3 attitude control motor (ACM) production facility at Camden yielded impressive results. Thanks to significant building upgrades that included increasing manufacturing space, improving automated production processes and purchasing new, advanced equipment, the site moved from two to three production lines, increasing ACM production by 40 percent.
New construction at the Camden site continues today at a rapid pace. The company recently opened a new Chemical Testing Laboratory and is putting the finishing touches on a new propellant processing facility that is expected to open soon. The pace of construction shows no signs of slowing as the team will be breaking ground on new facilities as modernization efforts continue.
“Our next major project is building the 65,000 square foot facility that will be dedicated to producing SRMs for the Guided Multiple Launch Rocket System (GMLRS),” added Emadi.
The project, part of the cooperative agreement with the DoD, will consolidate manufacturing activities from three buildings to a single, purpose-built facility equipped with upgraded equipment to automate operations in order to increase production capacity and overall efficiency.
“Our team has been committed to supporting the warfighter for decades, and it is very rewarding to see these enhancements put in place as we continue to deliver products that are so essential to the defense of our nation,” noted Emadi.
