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Community meeting takes a deeper look at Project Ranger
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RIO RANCHO — The gym and cafeteria of Cielo Azul Elementary were full Tuesday night as community members packed in to hear about — and ask questions about — the proposed Project Ranger facility from members of Castelion Corporation, the California company looking at Sandoval County land about 3 miles west of Rio Rancho for a hypersonic missile production facility.
While the company went over several aspects of the proposed facility, safety and community impact were a heavy focus of the meeting, which lasted nearly two hours.
Castelion CFO and cofounder Andrew Kreitz started off the evening by stressing one key point: “Nothing will be launched on site. … No flight testing will be done in Sandoval County or Rio Rancho.”
Castelion Corporation was on hand Tuesday, Oct. 21, 2025, to discuss the proposed Project Ranger plan that, if selected for New Mexico, would be located in Sandoval County approximately 3 miles west of Rio Rancho.
What is Project Ranger?“Project Ranger is the key, major effort for Castelion on manufacturing solid rocket motors and ultimately what are called all-up rounds,” Kreitz said.
“Project Ranger is a scale production site for manufacture of solid rocket motors and assembly of all-up rounds,” according to presentation slides provided by Castelion.
The site would assemble all-up rounds or finished missiles, manufacture solid rocket motors, assemble and test electronic components, and static firing of solid rocket motors.
What they won’t be doing, according to the presentation, is synthesizing ammonium perchlorate, launching missiles or manufacturing chemicals.
Castelion’s presentation described what makes solid rocket motors marketable and the standard, most common rocket motor used in U.S. tactical weapons. The presentation materials noted their use because “they are storable, affordable and insensitive to outside environments” with a storage capacity of up to 30 years.
Kreitz noted they’re very stable and much less volatile than liquid rocket propellants. “They’re actually very, very hard to set off; they’re very stable,” Kreitz said.
The process would include taking “a few classes of ingredients,” such as inert propellant materials, ammonium perchlorate and aluminum, mixing them into a slurry, cast the slurry into a motor case, and store them at a low temperature to cure and solidify. “Now you have a finished rocket burner,” Kretiz said, which is then taken to another area and piece it with the other parts to the the finished missile.
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“That goes into its own specialized shipping container … and then it’s shipped off to our partners inside the Department of Defense,” Kreitz said.
Why Sandoval County?During the presentation, Kreitz discussed what made Sandoval County — and the proximity to Rio Rancho — attractive for the project.
According to the slide, the company needs an “exceptional, patriotic talent base,” rapid access to electric and internet utilities, and a “large, contiguous land area.”
To answer those needs, the location offers proximity to Sandia National Laboratories, Los Alamos National Laboratory and Kirtland Air Force Base. The company also noted the states aerospace and defense heritage and industry.
In terms of talent, Kreitz noted it’s about finding the right people: “We need the right skills, but we also want people that understand the mission, understand the importance of national security and are willing and able and excited to work on a project like Project Ranger.”
As for utility access, Kreitz called being near them a “critical need” for the company.
“We’ve seen some really good progress on that with utility providers. We’re working that process right now at Castelion’s expense,” he said.
As for the land requirements, Castelion’s presentation noted the proposed site for Project Ranger, known as Section 36, is “ideally suited.”
“What the company doesn’t need is large amounts of water,” Kreitz said. “We do not use any processed water in the production of solid rocket motors or assembly. … We’re not using large quantities of it. Our internal estimates are, it should be equivalent to roughly 50 typical households in the area,” noting it’s mostly for bathrooms and sinks for the employees.
The average household uses approximately 300 gallons per day, according to New Mexico’s Water Science Center. For 50 homes that would amount to about 15,000 gallons a day.
Economic impactCastelion plans on investing heavily in Project Ranger, calling it a “substantial economic boon to the area.” The initial investment in the facility would be more than $100 million in the first year “and hundreds of millions more to follow.”
If Sandoval County were to be the chosen site, it would bring at least 300 “high-quality aerospace jobs” by year five with full benefits and an ownership stake in the company for all employees.
“Everybody gets a stake in the company; we think that’s really important,” Kreitz said.
Approximately 50% of the positions would be engineering jobs with the other half being skilled technicians. The average salary for those jobs would be around $100,000 per year. Castelion would also partner with and invest in local schools, trade schools and universities, according to the presentation materials.
Safety concernsOne of the concerns residents voiced about Project Ranger is the proximity to housing developments and schools.
However, Kreitz noted, the Sandoval County location would be situated much farther away from the community compared to other sites nationwide.
One graphic illustrated Project Ranger would be located 2.8 miles from Northern Meadows, 2.2 miles from Camino Crossing and 2.4 miles from the Rio Puerco Switching Station.
In comparison, other facilities are situated a mile or less from developments. A location in West Virginia is 1.2 miles away from a church and school and 900 feet from a house. In Calhoun County, Arkansas, a church is located a half a mile away. A Camden, Arkansas facility is 1 mile away from a school, the same distance a Utah facility is from a house.
By comparison, the nearest house is 2.2 miles from the Project Ranger site, while the nearest church and school are 3.5 miles away.
Spacing will also be a part of the facility’s design with each individual building being far enough away from each other that what the company called “hazard arcs” don’t intersect any other buildings; additionally, none of those arcs will cross the perimeter’s fence.
Additionally, Kretiz and other Castelion representatives presented the numerous mitigations, codes and standards the company will be following to ensure safety to the employees and the community. Regulators for those codes include the Construction Industries Division, Department of War (formerly Department of Defense), New Mexico Department of Transportation, New Mexico Historic Preservation Division and the New Mexico Environment Department.
From those codes come numerous mitigation measures that Kreitz discussed: Buildings are spaced out enough to prevent a fire in one building to spread to another and to keep the public outside the perimeter safe; hazardous operations will be operated remotely; working on coordinating an emergency response plan with emergency services; electronic tracking of all hazardous materials in the facility; earthen berms to further isolate the buildings; and a full perimeter fence and 24/7 security on site.
Kreitz explained that the first line of defense staff training.
“Everyone needs to know what you do if there is a spill,” he said. “Number two is built-in containment systems in all of the buildings to prevent any spills from migrating into the ground.”
All individuals who handle hazardous chemicals “will be trained to properly manage waste and spills,” according to the presentation, and the buildings will be engineered with the containment systems Kreitz noted. Facilities handling hazardous dust or materials will also “have a dust collection system designed for that material.”
Additionally, the site will have a full-time Environmental, Health and safety team, and an emergency response plan to manage any accidental spills has been developed, according to presentation materials.
Kretiz also stressed that any work with chemicals will be done on a concrete pad with built-in containment systems by trained personnel. “This is all pretty tightly controlled,” he said.
Waste from the site, he said, will all be congregated together and removed by contractors that specialize in disposing of the type of waste the facility would produce.
“We’ll aggregate it together, hand it off to a regulated, licensed contractor that will then take it off site to a controlled area for disposal,” he said.
Patrick Hodgkiss, director of manufacturing, also noted that the site would have a code variance approved by the state, county and city fire departments to remove sprinklers and hydrants in hazardous buildings, citing International Fire Code that “exempts sprinkler systems in buildings using ammonium perchlorate to produce solid rocket motors.” That is to prevent AP from being dissolved in water and potentially infiltrating the ground water. Additionally, mixing aluminum powder with water would produce a flammable hydrogen gas.
“The materials that we are working with react with water,” Hodgkiss said. “This isn’t something that hasn’t been done before. This is a relatively understood process.”
To further highlight how the distance built into the plans of the Project Ranger site, Castelion officials cited case studies at sites where accidents have occurred.
One study noted an April 2025 incident at a facility where sodium perchlorate pellets, a precursor to ammonium perchlorate, which will not be produced at the potential Sandoval County site, were crushed by equipment, causing a fire. No injuries were reported as people were able to evacuate the building, and buildings as close as 120 feet away remained undamaged.
“It’s a process that’s understood, well-controlled tightly regulated and done very safely,” Kreitz said.
Transportation concernsCastelion highlighted the route that shipment and delivery trucks would use Paseo Del Volcan to US-550 and out from there.
Kreitz acknowledged concerns of the traffic passing by both SRMC and Cleveland High School but said that after conducting a traffic study, the company feels comfortable with the route because it would be a very short period that the trucks would be passing those buildings compounded by the low propensity of risk from safeguards put in place that an incident near them would be “infinitesimally unlikely,” noting that they were unable to find any reports of such an incident.
“We feel very confident about the route safety,” he said.
When asked about the potential for an attack or incident while crossing the Rio Grande bridge in Bernalillo, Kreitz said that while no official study on that particular stretch of road had been conducted, he again noted the unlikelihood of an incident that he mentioned with the school and the hospital as well as the security measure of “hiding in plain sight.”
Kretiz said they do not foresee a huge amount of truck traffic from the operation of Project Ranger, saying an estimated one to three trucks, depending on the category of shipment, would be coming through per week. “It’s not a continuous stream of trucks driving past every day; it’s a couple per week.”
He also noted that at this point, most of the work would be done on one shift unless global conditions change and demands increase.
However, he did go into detail about the extensive testing protocols for shipping that are mandated for both the finished product and the ammonium perchlorate used in production.
Testing requirements for all-up round insensitive munitions and payload shipment testing include fast heating using jet fuel to simulate a fire from a vehicle collision; slow heating to mimic fire buildup in a truck; bullet impact testing with shots from 0.50-caliber bullets; fragment impact testing where high-velocity shrapnel is shot to replicate a nearby explosion; a sympathetic reaction to detonate munitions at close range; a shaped charge jet where anti-tank weapons, such as rocket-propelled grenades are shot; and a drop test from a 40-foot height.
The presentation materials also note that the site would only produce insensitive munitions.
Ammonium perchlorate shipment testing requirements include double-wrapped plastic bags placed in a steel drum; plastic bag testing including being dropped from a 6-foot height and a pressure test of up to 240 PSI; and steel drum testing that includes being dropped from a 4-foot height, a bottom lift test where its filled to 125% of weight and lift in the air, a pressurized test for leaks, a stack test with additional containers to check for deformation, and a vibration test to inspect for rupture or leakage.
Kreitz also compared the risk posed of the more familiar site of a gasoline tanker to a truck Castelion would utilize for shipping to and from the site, noting the tanker has 60 times as much energy as a truck full of all-up rounds and 25 times as much energy as a truck full of ammonium perchlorate.
Environmental impactIn addition to mitigations built into the site to prevent chemicals from seeping into the groundwater, officials noted the possibility of some noise pollution in Northern Meadows.
According to the presentation materials, static fire testing on the site “will generate sound levels equivalent to a vacuum cleaner for approximately 30 seconds at a time” in the neighborhood.
However, “testing will only be conducted during working hours inside of a test stand,” the materials state.
They also note the byproducts have been reviewed by the New Mexico Environment Department. Kreitz mentioned during the question-and-answer session that an archeological study has already been conducted on the site.
One resident asked about the potential vibrations of the testing impacting land shift and damaging foundations.
“We have not done any study on vibration in the ground because we’re not aware of any instances where that’s caused problems in any other sites, but we’re happy to look into it,” Kreitz said.
