This land northwest of Salt Lake City oscillates between steep-sloped mountains and long stretches of flatland. The terrain echoes the cycles of its history. Railroads, cattle, and Cold War weapons projects have all come in booms and gone in busts, bringing jobs and people to this sparsely populated expanse of Utah and then taking them away.

We've come to visit Promontory, a word that doesn’t describe a town or even a county. It refers to the mountain chain that extends like a finger of land into the Great Salt Lake. There’s been a rocket- and missile-manufacturing center at the knuckle of this finger since the 1950s. This is the place that built a generation of rocket motors for Minuteman and Poseidon nuclear missiles, as well the Space Shuttle’s solid rocket boosters.

It doesn’t take long to see clues that this place makes dangerous things.

The company's name has changed—it's now Orbital ATK—but rocket motors are still the game here. As the space industry expands and new players shove into the launch market, the engineers here are fighting for their part of this future.

Today, Orbital ATK’s rocket engine research plant is surrounded by ranches and grazing cattle. But Utah’s rocketeers are try to capitalize on another boom—literally and figuratively. As the space industry expands and new players are shoving into the rocket launch market, the engineers here are fighting for their part of this future.

Solid Rocket City

Orbital ATK has new machinery that crates carbon composite rockets of a size the company has never manufactured, especially not for Uncle Sam. Orbital ATK

The Orbital ATK’s Propulsion Systems Division facility is like a little standalone town. It has its own fire department and water supply. The streets are laid out in the simple grid. Look around, though, and it doesn’t take long to see clues that this place makes dangerous things.

There are protective blast bunkers everywhere. Escape slides jut from the sides of buildings. The gate guards warn you that lighters and matches are not welcome. Designated smoking shelters for employees have spark-less lighters built into their structures. Outside of this place, few remember a raging fire here that killed four in 1987, when the plant was busy making nuclear missiles. For staff here, it‘s a natural topic of conversation.

Escape hatches on buildings. Orbital ATK

The reason for all this caution becomes evident the moment you step inside the buildings. Segments of solid rocket boosters are built and loaded with propellant. Orbital has towering stands where new rocket engines are tested and older ones can be evaluated as they age.

This is solid rocket booster country.

These days, the space world is in love with liquid-fueled rockets. Thousands of miles from Utah, tech titans like Elon Musk of SpaceX and Jeff Bezos of Blue Origin are staging a billionaire's space race powered by this newer technology. Liquid engines have complex, cryogenic plumbing, but offer more control than solid rocket engines, which are hard to make and can’t be shut down once started (though they store well and are very reliable).

The other key difference: Liquid engines are easier to clean and reuse than solids, due to the physical charring of the interior of the solid rocket booster. Musk and Bezos are both pursuing reusable rockets as a way to reduce the cost of going to orbit and increase access to space.

Orbital once had a lock on the launch propulsion market that it earned over decades of production. But Orbital (then a solo entity) took a serious blow in 2009 when the Obama administration cancelled the Constellation program, for which it was building the rocket’s boosters. NASA put more emphasis on the commercial space programs started under the Bush administration, which were focused on liquid fuel and rapid reusability. Orbital ATK doesn’t pursue quick-turnaround reusability as a main cost driver, putting them at odds with this trend. Detractors declare Orbital's solid rockets outdated — as they’ve done since the 1980s.

And yet, Orbital ATK stays busy as the largest vendor of solid rockets in this country. The company says it has developed on average one flight systems every two years for the last two decades and builds 20 rockets annually. About 14 Orbital ATK space rockets launch each year, including the company’s cargo flights to the International Space Station. They have a slew of programs that aid other spaceflight firms, like side boosters for the Delta IV rockets launched by the United Launch Alliance. They also make motors for the Pentagon, powering targets for missile defense interceptors and providing the engines for Ohio-class submarine-launched nuclear missiles.

But it will be the two towering marquee projects now under way that will decide the future of Orbital's propulsion systems division in Utah and elsewhere. "It’s exciting times around here,” says Ben Case, the division’s engineering manager for conceptual design and flight performance.

The Next Generation of Launch

NGL in flight. Joe Pappalardo

For now, the rocket is simply called the Next Generation Launch (NGL). For the most part, this launcher will vie for U.S. Air Force satellite launches, but the company designed the system to be flexible enough to serve other customers by adding core segments and side boosters. One version of NGL is a heavy lifter that, according to Case, will surpass the Delta IV Heavy. The Air Force and Orbital ATK are sharing the cost of the NGL rocket, which is expected to fly in 2021.

During our visit to the NGL factory floor, a five-person crew of technicians unwrapped the Saran-Wrap like coating from a freshly baked rocket core. This and a similar one, standing to its side, are among the first to be created. One is destined to be a body double for logistics operations. The other is fated to be pressure-tested until it bursts.

Orbital ATK crafted these rocket parts on a new carbon composite machine. It features a slowly revolving mandrel (mold) and robotic arm that can spin fibers across a 25-foot-long rocket core. Dozens of spools of composite ribbon run onto a platform and into a trough, which the techs fill with buckets of resin. The resin infuses the strands before they are applied to the mandrel. They weave a shell around the mold strip by strip, like a spider wrapping a fly. Once this process starts, there’s no stopping. “With epoxy resin, it’s round-the-clock work until it’s done,” says LeRon Weeks, who runs operations in the composite shop building.

These work platforms are the place where the Space Shuttle’s boosters were made. NASA’s new heavy rocket has the same dimensions, bringing new work to this stand. Orbital ATK

Using composites is not new for Orbital, but they’ve not utilized it on such a large vehicle or for a government customer. “It’s a great point of entrance for the commercial technologies that we’ve been using over the years to get applied to a motor of that scale,” Case says. “It’s been thrilling to see it go from a concept to see the start of the building process, for it to become hardware, to become reality. It’s great for our engineers’ morale to see that.”

After the composite core is solidified in an oven, the rocket segment is ready for another crew to install the metal connectors for both ends of the three-stage rocket. Adding insulation sounds easy, but make no mistake, this is its own detailed science. Insulation must protect the rocket from temperatures of 5,000 degrees F or more. Also, it has varying thicknesses that influences the speed of the burn. Such subtle shaping helps control the thrust profile of the rocket, tailoring it for its intended mission. In this way, solid rockets are able to throttle, in their own way, if constructed with that flight profile in mind.

In another building at Promontory, the segments are lowered into an underground shaft where they will be loaded with solid rocket fuel, a mixture of aluminum powder fuel and ammonium perchlorate as the oxidizer. All you need is the right spark to set off the whole damn thing. That's provided by a part of the ignition system that isn’t put in place until the time of launch.

The solid rocket fuel has a peanut butter consistency. It sticks to the insulation inside the walls of the core as it is poured into the rocket column. The fuel goo spreads around a mold that has been lowered inside. The whole thing is then baked, slowly, so the fuel feels more like a gritty pencil erasure. The mold is removed, and an igniter installed like a pin of a grenade. Now the rocket segment is ready to roll via train to Cape Canaveral or Vandenberg Air Force Base for assembly and launch.

All this work goes at during an absolutely crucial juncture for Orbital ATK. The company is currently competing to win a big contract called the Evolved Expendable Launch Vehicle (EELV) for U.S. Air Force satellite launches. Orbital ATK has survived so far, but faces an important moment this summer when the competition will winnow down to three. Orbital ATK is preparing to select a liquid rocket motor supplier for NGL’s cryogenic upper stage, and is expected to make an announcement soon.

Where SLS Is Real

An employee working on SLS hardware in late March. Orbital ATK

Away from Promontory, the Space Launch System is a punching bag. NASA's next huge heavy-lift rocket tends to be derided as the worst kind of government boondoggle: over budget, behind schedule, and a jobs program for certain members of Congress rather than a viable spaceflight platform. Here in Utah, the worst insult may be those who say SLS is based on "obsolete" technology that isn't ready for the future, and isn't needed in a world where companies like SpaceX make their own heavy-lift rockets.

At Promontory, however, the SLS is a point of pride. SLS promises to be one of the most powerful rockets ever made and at its heart are 17 stories of solid rocket boosters made by Orbital ATK. The five-segment booster burns six tons of solid propellant each second, at temperatures high enough to make steel boil, during the first crucial minutes of flight.

Anti-SLS talk causes deep frown lines and well-rationalized defenses. SpaceX tech maybe sexier, but Orbital ATK has proven flight performance over several decades and has steadily upgraded its hardware and facilities. For example, the boosters they are making for SLS have 25 percent more performance than those used on the Space Shuttle, the company says.

“Coming out of our decades of experience with the shuttle, there was a great argument to be made to use all of that heritage moving forward with the Space Launch System,” Case says. “A great majority of our tools, processes, the actual hardware itself, is leveraged very directly for use in SLS.”

The 12-foot diameter of SLS rockets is the same as the shuttle’s external tanks, so Orbital ATK can use the same towering work platforms where the originals were made. In fact, every steel casing here has been flown on Space Shuttle flights, recovered from the ocean, and refurbished. The steel rocket casings receive new insulation and metal connections, readying for shipment to Florida and the first SLS test flights in 2019. This is the solid rocket motor version of reusability. It's not as fast or innovative as SpaceX’s flyback boosters, but a system that officials here say makes more sense for low-cadence launches.

But the program has an eye on future innovation, even where SLS is concerned. The future of the Space Launch System may not be steel, Case notes, but composite replacements. “There are only a finite number of those (steel cases) left,” he says. “So we look for opportunities. And we look at some of the technology we leveraged and developed (for EELV) as alternatives for the future.”

Past Meets Future

These steel SLS boosters are veterans of Space Shuttle launches. Orbital ATK

Even with its long legacy in spaceflight, Orbital ATK is now a leaner, more cost-conscious operation. Those employees who remain here are 20- and 30-year veterans, grateful survivors of the business cycles that have buffeted the industry. But with NGL and SLS, there are some new, younger faces here as well. “These will be the ones running things here in the future,” says Darwin Bee, a veteran engineer who runs the insulation and component operation.

For a company that is often accused of being a standard-bearer for a bygone era, Orbital ATK remains eager to jump on 21st century opportunities that could suit its solid-rocket motors. Kent Rominger, a five-time Shuttle astronaut and current vice president of Strategic Programs for the Propulsion Systems Division, tells Popular Mechanics the company is keeping a close eye on USAF interest in hypersonic weapons, for instance. Hypersonic vehicles take off on ballistic missiles but steer down to adopt hard-to-spot flight profiles. Solid rockets could be used for reliable launches at a moment’s notice, as evidenced by their use in nuclear missiles. “I think that will be some interesting work for us,” Rominger says.

In this handout provided by NASA, The second and final qualification motor (QM-2) test for the Space Launch Systems booster is seen, Tuesday, June 28, 2016, at Orbital ATK Propulsion Systems test facilities in Promontory, Utah. NASA Getty Images

The upbeat feeling comes with a good amount of nerves. There’s a lot of uncertainty coming to Promontory in 2018, including Orbital ATK's impending purchase by Northrop Grumman, which is expected to make its next legal steps forward this year. Orbital and ATK merged in 2014, fusing a spaceflight and intercontinental missile company with an ammunition and small missile powerhouse. Now the company faces more consolidation. Will the firm lose its identity in the merger, or will absorption into a major contractor empower the solid rocket manufacturers?

The nearest point of interest to Promontory is the famed connection point where the two sides of the first intercontinental railroad met. As time moved on and trains became bigger, the original stretch of track shut down, its steel torn up for industrial use in World War II. The nearby historic park is a reminder that transportation is always in a state of flux, and that being on the wrong side of changing trends can result in abandonment. It’s a lesson that Orbital ATK hopes not to repeat.

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