Avio USA Solid Rocket Motor Plant, Hurt, Virginia

Avio USA’s solid rocket motor plant in Hurt, Virginia, is a $500 million bet that the U.S. missile supply chain can support another motor maker. The company broke ground on Sept. 29, 2026, at the Southern Virginia Multimodal Park in Pittsylvania County, with HITT Contracting as general contractor.

Avio USA is the American subsidiary of Avio S.p.A., the Rome-based firm behind the Vega launcher’s solid stages, and it runs under a Defense Counterintelligence and Security Agency special security agreement. This is its first U.S. factory. The plan is to turn out thousands of solid rocket motors a year for tactical missile programs, with Lockheed Martin and Raytheon named as early program customers.

Project Scope

The campus covers roughly 900,000 square feet. That figure has moved: Virginia’s February announcement put the facility at 860,000 square feet, and the September groundbreaking release rounded up to about 900,000.

It won’t be one building. HITT’s Josh Foreso told Construction Dive the job includes more than 35 separate structures, split among protective construction for energetics work, environmentally controlled production space and administrative buildings. He also flagged the site’s topography as a logistics problem. Energetics plants spread out by design, with separation distances between buildings, so a hilly site makes grading and haul routes a bigger part of the job than they’d be on a flat industrial pad.

The land has an industrial past. The Southern Virginia Multimodal Park sits on the former Burlington Industries textile plant, which closed in 2007.

Construction is expected to finish in late 2028, with production starting in early 2029. No architect or engineer has been named publicly.

Why It Matters

Solid rocket motors have been one of the tightest bottlenecks in U.S. munitions production, with most capacity concentrated in a couple of suppliers. Avio USA CEO James Syring, a retired Navy vice admiral and former Missile Defense Agency director, says the company wants to be an independent merchant supplier selling to multiple primes. That’s the pitch. Whether the primes spread their orders around is a separate question.

The construction pipeline behind it is real. Westside Construction Group said in May that solid rocket motor projects in the works top $3 billion.

The public money is substantial. Virginia’s Major Employment and Investment Commission approved a special appropriation of up to $97.7 million, subject to General Assembly approval, and the Staunton River Regional Industrial Facility Authority and its member localities put together a performance-based local package worth more than $33.6 million. The jobs number needs care. The state’s February release said more than 1,000, while the groundbreaking release headline repeats that figure and its body says roughly 1,500.

Project Team & Details