A rocket engine exploded during testing at the Anduril facility in Mississippi last Friday, marking another setback for the startup’s hopes of becoming a major supplier of rocket propulsion systems to the defense industry. Anduril publicly confirmed the incident after an inquiry from WIRED.
No one was injured in the blast that damaged the Anduril test site, the company’s chief operating officer Matt Grimm said in a statement. post on social media on Tuesday, hours after WIRED contacted the company about the incident.
Three people familiar with Anduril’s operations, who were granted anonymity to discuss the sensitive situation, tell WIRED they could not recall a similar test resulting in an explosion at any time in the past few years, and were unaware of what might have caused last week’s misfortune. The incident halted a key stage of prototype testing that generates revenue for the Anduril rocket engine team, and rebuilding the system could take up to several months, one of the people said.
Grimm wrote in his post, which included photos of smoldering equipment, that Anduril expected to resume testing within a few weeks. “Anduril continues to build and test rocket engines on a weekly basis, and the production facility is operating on schedule,” he said. “Disciplined iteration ensures steady progress, and we are already assembling the pieces of our testbed for the next test.”
Shannon Prior, a spokeswoman for Anduril, did not respond to a request for comment on the matter beyond pointing to Grimm’s post.
Anduril had planned to begin mass production of rocket engines on July 1, 2025, but a year later it has yet to do so, four people familiar with the matter said, disputing Grimm’s claim that work is on schedule. A former Pentagon official who helped award Anduril the multimillion-dollar grant previously told WIRED that he expected years of delays despite the company’s promises to deliver the convoluted technology on time. U.S. production of solid rocket engines is largely controlled by just a few companies, leading to shortages that the Pentagon is trying to overcome by supporting startups.
ON social mediaAnduril founder Palmer Luckey described some of the incidents described in earlier WIRED reports as “complaining about… senseless things.” Company president, Trae Stephens, he wrote in a separate post that Anduril “scales faster than anyone in this industry” and “solves problems as we find them.”
Before the company could mass produce rocket engines at McHenry, Anduril generated revenue by designing, building and testing prototype engines for customers such as the U.S. Navy. The business generated tens of millions of dollars in revenue for the company last year, according to a person familiar with the numbers. Even critics of the unit say the testing industry is doing well. Once the prototypes are built, Anduril measures the effectiveness of the designs, including fuel burn time. Customers receive data enabling the implementation of their plans. This work may now be suspended.