Jason Hundley, Founder and CEO of X-Bow Systems, announced the flight test of Buckler, a relatively low-cost interceptor designed to counter drones and cruise missiles at scale. Hundley described the launch as a direct response to a math problem the Pentagon can no longer afford to ignore.
“You can’t win a war of attrition trading million-dollar interceptors against thousand-dollar threats,” Hundley said. “Buckler has flown, it comes in under US$100,000, and we build its airframe and propulsion ourselves — the part of the industrial base that is so stressed by today’s munitions demands. This is our answer to the call from the U.S. and its allies: affordable capability, at scale.”
That affordability claim traces back to a manufacturing shift X-Bow has been building toward for years. Speaking earlier at Fed Supernova 2025, Hundley described the traditional way solid rocket motors get made as barely changed since the Korean War. Asked to explain it, he reached for a household comparison: “take a KitchenAid mixer and you make it explosion proof and make it like two to three stories tall — that’s how we make the stuff.” For decades, he said, the only way to add capacity was to build an even bigger version of the same machine, at a cost of billions in capital expenditure. X-Bow’s alternative replaces that batch process with a continuous, small-volume one, handling only a few hundred pounds of material at a time instead of thousands. The upside isn’t just safety — if something goes wrong, the company loses a few pounds of material rather than an entire production run, giving it a near-instant quality-control loop. Hundley put the resulting savings at 10-20 percent on smaller motors and as much as 20-50 percent on mid-scale systems, though he acknowledged the approach doesn’t translate to the largest boosters, like those used on SLS.
Hundley also pointed to a structural risk underlying the entire industry: decades of supplier consolidation have left the solid rocket motor supply chain riddled with single points of failure. He cited 4D carbon-carbon — a material used in critical SRM components and hypersonic leading edges — as an example of a part effectively made by only one qualified U.S. supplier. It’s a vulnerability, he argued, that a distributed, lower-cost manufacturing base like X-Bow’s is partly designed to correct.