Rocket motors for the missile crunch: X-Bow's affordability play

Key points

Key takeaways from theCUBE interview with X-Bow Systems founder and CEO Jason Hundley (October 2026):

Affordable mass over performance at any cost. Hundley says the missile-munitions crisis has shifted the solid rocket motor industry from systems designed for performance at any cost toward affordable mass, and that X-Bow's technology and throughput are built for that equation.

Solid rocket motors are the bottleneck. Everything in the missile and munitions world is powered by solid rocket motors, including drones boosted to cruise altitude; X-Bow's near-term hot item is rocket-assisted take-off motors for Group 3 and Group 4 drones.

Compressing fielding timelines. Ukraine has turned battlefield qualification into a fast test channel: new systems can be licensed and qualified on the conflict there immediately, and hardware and software upgrade cycles run at six to eight weeks versus multi-year block upgrades in the US.

Autonomy-first factories. X-Bow's next generation of manufacturing starts from autonomy first, with modular factory floors spanning prototyping and mass production and shrinking supply chains from seven or eight steps to one or two.

Domain expertise decides who survives. Hundley argues that newcomers without deep knowledge of their corner of the industry fail, citing Saronic Technologies ' shipyard expertise as the reason it is succeeding at making shipbuilding more responsive.

Scaling the business. X-Bow is now well over 500 people, has doubled in size for three or four years and brought its Texas factory online this year; it targets more than $1bn of annual revenue within two years and is working towards a Series C.

Skin in the game in defence procurement. The US government has shifted from funding 90–100% of development toward co-investment with industry, which Hundley credits with forcing both sides to back the right programmes and filtering out companies without conviction.

Cross-generational workforce. With employees spanning baby boomers to Generation Alpha, a large part of scaling is transferring lessons from older subject-matter experts to the newer generation, particularly in niche defence industries.

Read more: theCUBE on YouTube · SiliconANGLE