Anduril rocket motor explodes at Mississippi test site

This article was published on July 3, 2026 A solid rocket motor exploded during a test fire at Anduril's Mississippi factory last Friday. The $61bn defence startup, which confirmed the blast only after WIRED asked, calls it a routine step on the road to mass production. Insiders describe a programme already behind schedule. Anduril has become the poster child for a faster, software-speed kind of defence contractor. Last Friday, one of its rocket motors blew up on a test stand in Mississippi. The blast is a small setback that carries an outsized message about how hard building missiles really is. A solid rocket motor exploded during a test fire at Anduril’s factory in McHenry, Mississippi, the company confirmed. It did so only after WIRED, which first reported the incident, asked about it. No one was hurt. The safety systems worked as designed, and most of the damage was to the test stand itself. Chief operating officer Matt Grimm chose candour. In a post on X with photos of charred equipment, he framed the blast as routine. Every test failure, he argued, yields data that makes the next design stronger. Anduril would be “back to test firing rockets within weeks,” he wrote, and the p