By Lee Roop
The “largest commercial launch deal ever” is bringing 250 new rocket plant jobs and three new facilities to Decatur.
Decatur’s Industrial Development Board met Thursday to approve slightly under $883,000 in tax abatements for lead rocket builder United Launch Alliance and the companies Beyond Gravity and M&J Industries. ULA and Beyond Gravity are on Red Hat Road; M&J Industries is on the Decatur Beltway.
Jeff Bezos, Executive Chair at Amazon, announced in April that Amazon will buy 38 ULA Vulcan rockets for “Project Kuiper,” a new commercial communications satellite galaxy he plans to launch. ULA will build new Vulcans in Decatur to lift those satellites into orbit. ULA CEO Tory Bruno told AL.com in May that “Strategic partner” Beyond Gravity creates “composite structures” for the rockets and will be expand into its own building.
M&J Industries, a custom materials fabrication company, is also adding its own building for the project. It will hire around 50 new workers.
“We’re excited for the growth these companies are seeing and the jobs they are creating,” the Decatur-Morgan County Chamber of Commerce said.
The tax abatements are for 10 years and are for non-educational real and personal property taxes. The project is still estimated to create $1.025 million in new state, Morgan County, City of Hartselle and City of Decatur personal property school taxes during the period. It is also estimated to generate $4 million in Morgan County sales and use taxes to benefit area schools.
Bruno told AL.com in April the new contract means more building, more jobs and more barges for the “ULA Navy” that takes completed rockets down the Tennessee River and eventually to Cape Canaveral, Fla.
ULA’s Vulcan rocket is built with “modular rocket architecture,” Bruno said, “which is still a little bit unusual in the industry in that we add or subtract solid rocket boosters to give it more capability and be able to tailor it a little bit to the payload.”
For Project Kuiper, Bruno said that means “maximum configuration” of 5.4 meters in diameter, which is much bigger than the company’s workhorse Atlas rocket. “And then we add six of these giant 120,000-pound-each solid rocket motors to it, which gives it a tremendous amount of thrust,” Bruno said.
ULA will start another robotic assembly line in Decatur making two lines running side by side. “There will be significantly more than (the 30 current rocket cores a day) just two or three years from now.”
“For Decatur, it’s about the production rate,” Bruno said, “because we expect to be flying 20- to 25 times a year now.”
